One of the key things for me about Madame Walker's life is that she really does represent this first generation out of slavery when black people were reinventing themselves, and as a woman who was the first child in her family born free, she was trying to figure out a way, and she moved from Delta, Louisiana.
By 1916, as Madam Walker herself was developing more assertive views on race, she was becoming eager to assume her place alongside Harlem's famous, influential and intriguing residents.
Madam Walker, as part of the first generation out of slavery, really was inventing the way that she operated in the world.
If a CEO takes an interest in you and he happens to be an Asian man, then that's great, but as an African-American woman, you want to make sure that if the executive vice-president of the company is an African-American woman that you get to know her.
Madame Walker was mythologized like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but I want to show that she was fabulous on her own.
As much as any woman of the twentieth century, Madam Walker paved the way for the profound social changes that altered women's place in American society.
God puts pack rats together with non-pack rats.
I was like other teenagers in the late 1960s; I too was very interested in having an Afro and getting rid of the perm that was in my hair.
She used her wealth and philanthropy to contribute to Black schools and colleges, she gave the largest gift the NAACP had ever received to it's anti-lynching fund... Madam Walker's life was one of transformation and re-invention.
Don't sit around and wait for the opportunities to come. You have to get up and make those opportunities come.
