Honorable Mention
A'Lelia Walker

Full name, Lelia McWilliams Robinson Wilson Kennedy; born June 6, 1885, in Vicksburg, MS; daughter of Sarah Breedlove (founder of a hair-care products company; later known as Madam C. J. Walker) and Moses McWilliams; married a man named Robinson (divorced, 1914); married Wiley Wilson, (a doctor), 1919 (marriage ended); married James Arthur Kennedy (a doctor), early 1920s (divorced, 1931); children: Mae Bryant Perry. Education: Attended Knoxville College, early 1900s.

Walker was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended Knoxville College in Tennessee before going to work for her mother, Madame C.J. Walker (Sarah Breedlove Walker), who had made a fortune in the hair-care business. When her mother died in 1919, Walker inherited the business and the lavish family estate, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington, N.Y.

Certainly the most opulent parties in Harlem were thrown by the heiress A'Lelia Walker. Walker was a striking, tall, dark-skinned woman who was rarely seen without her riding crop and her imposing, jeweled turban. She was the only daughter of Madame C. J. Walker, a former washerwoman who had made millions marketing her own hair-straightening process. When she died, Madame Walker left virtually her entire fortune to A'Lelia. Whereas Madame Walker had been civic-minded, donating thousands of dollars to charity, A'Lelia used most of her inheritance to throw lavish parties in her palatial Hudson River estate, Villa Lewaro. and at her Manhattan dwelling on 136th Street. Because A'Lelia adored the company of lesbians and gay men, her parties had a distinctly gay ambience. Elegant homosexuals such as Edward Perry, Edna Thomas. Harold Jackman, and Caska Bonds were her closest friends. So were scores of white celebrities. Novelist Marjorie Worthington would later remember.

HARLEM HOSTESS. Parties were the hub of Harlem's nocturnal culture, and they helped grease the social Renaissance. The most official of these events were held at the Civic Club and the most proper consisted of Sunday afternoon literary talks, often in French, at Jessie Fauset's home, or in one of the Dunbar Apartments. The most lavish parties were undoubtedly those thrown by A'Lelia Walker, the hostess of the Renaissance. Standing six feet tall, her statuesque presence was emphasized by high heels and tall plumes. The four- times-married heiress wore silk dresses and ermine coatees, paisley beaded shawls from Wanamaker's, and sable muffs, and her well-modeled head and cocoa complexion were set off by silver turbans. "She looked like a queen," observed Carl Van Vechten, "and frequently acted like a tyrant." A'Lelia could afford to do both.

The hundreds of parties she threw during the 1920s were financed by the fortune she inherited from her mother, Madame C. J. Walker, whose life provides the most inspirational of black Horatio Alger stories. An orphaned child of ex-slave sharecroppers, she worked as a washerwoman. As a result of stress and poor diet, her hair began falling out when, about 1903, a large black man appeared to her in a dream and revealed a secret recipe to combat baldness. She decided to invest in her vision, and with capital of $1.50, she started a hair- straightening empire that marketed "Madame Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower" and adapted "hot combs" to straighten the hair of black women. At the time of her death in 1919, her enterprise had yielded over $2 million as well as a mansion called the Villa Lewaro. In contrast to her mother, A'Lelia invested her energy neither in the hair culture business nor in her mother's favorite charities (her will earmarked two-thirds of the profits from the Walker empire for charity). A'Lelia instead devoted herself to developing a Harlem high society that included whites and blacks, royalty and racketeers, lesbians and homosexual men, writers and singers. Her guest list, one observer reported, "read like a blue book of the seven arts," and her parties provided an Uptown counterpart to those Carl Van Vechten threw Downtown.

Walker Agents Convention Delegates at Villa Lewaro, 1924 -- Photograph courtesy of A'Lelia Bundles/Walker Family Collection.

A'Lelia's most elegant parties were held at the Villa Lewaro, her cream- colored Italianate mansion fifteen miles up the Hudson in Irvington, designed by Vertner Woodson Tandy, the first African American licensed to practice architecture in New York State. A'Lelia was afraid to stay at the villa alone (it was here that her mother had died of Bright's disease in 1919), so she invited guests for long weekends of ostentatious luxury. They were met by black servants in white wig, doublet, and hose and encouraged to rest in Hepplewhite furniture while enjoying her $60,000 Estey pipe organ or her twenty-four-carat gold-plated piano.

Although those weekends were the most extravagant of A'Lelia's events, the most widely attended took place in her Harlem mansion at 108-110 West 136th Street--which she named “The Dark Tower" after Countee Cullen's column by that name. In the fall of 1928, A'Lelia announced her interest in Harlem's cultural life. She joined her twin limestone townhouses, and, inspired by bohemian friends, she envisioned music being played there, paintings and sculpture on view, and poetry read. Although no one thought her new pursuit could compete with her passions for shopping, poker, and bridge, they were impressed that she transformed her new cultural enthusiasm into an ongoing salon. She named her salon "the Dark Tower" after Countee Cullen's column in Opportunity, and she had Langston Hughes's "The Weary Blues" lettered on one wall. Guests entered through long French doors and stepped onto the blue-velvet runner that led into a splendid tearoom. They checked their hats for 15 cents and listened to a talking parrot. One might remain below to drink and dance on the parquet floor, or ascend to the top-floor library for conversation and bridge, surrounded by bookcases containing works written by African Americans.

Walker (left), c. 1930s Underwood & Underwood/ Corbis-Bettmann

Everything in A'Lelia's parlor-cum-tearoom-salon represented the ostentatious best that money could buy: the designer was Paul Frankel; the carpet, Aubusson; the furniture, Louis XIV; the turquoise and amethyst paste tea service, Sèvres; the drink, champagne. Sometimes the music issued from a sky-blue Victrola, but more often someone played a Knabe baby grand piano. Fresh from the Broadway revues were Alberta Hunter, Adelaide Hall, and the Four Bon Bons. Nightclub crooners included Jimmie Daniels and Gus Simons, and Taylor Gordon sang spirituals. A'Lelia's ever-present retinue-Wallace Thurman dubbed them ladies- in-waiting- included striking light-skinned women (actress Edna Thomas, Mayme White, Mae Fain) and witty homosexual men (Casca Bonds, Edward Perry) who organized the socials. For one of her most notorious (and possibly apocryphal) parties, she reversed the favors usually accorded the races-white guests were served pig's feet, chitterlings, and bathtub gin, while the black guests, seated in separate and more posh quarters, dined on caviar, pheasant, and champagne.

The Dark Tower was a fashion showcase, with blacks and whites showing off to one another. Bon vivant novelist Max Ewing described one evening to his parents in Ohio: "You have never seen such clothes as millionaire Negroes get into. They are more gorgeous than a Ziegfeld finale. They do not stop at fur coats made of merely one kind of fur. They add collars of ermine to gray fur, or black fur collars to ermine. Ropes of jewels and trailing silks of all bright colors."

Some of A'Lelia's guests relished her extravaganzas while simultaneously looking upon their hostess-dubbed the "dekink heiress" and the "Mahogany Millionairess"-as a dubious flowering of Negritude. Some artists avoided A'Lelia's, as Richard Bruce Nugent recalled, "Because actually it was a place for A'Lelia to show off her blackness to whites." A'Lelia's fortune sprang from Negroes' aspiration to appear more European-even though Madame Walker insisted this had never been her intention. A'Lelia's favorite cabaret, white-owned Connie's Inn, discriminated against less-wealthy blacks. Although she supported Harlem culture, she had little interest in intellectual talk and rarely read books; one acquaintance cattily declared seven minutes to be her limit for elevated conversation. Whatever her limitations, she managed to surround herself with titled Europeans; bosses of Wall Street; members of the Social Register; leaders of music, stage, and literature. As Richard Bruce Nugent observed, she "had made her bid for space on the upper rungs of the sepia social ladder."

In some ways, The Dark Tower served to reinforce the prejudice some in the black community had against Walker; she was sometimes seen as more interested in presenting authentic "Negro" culture for the benefit of her white acquaintances that actually promoting it with financial support. On one occasion, in what would become an apocryphal tale of the Harlem Renaissance, Walker separated her guests by color and served whites chitterlings and bathtub gin, while blacks enjoyed champagne and caviar. Some among Harlem's upper stratosphere even snubbed her for being the daughter of a washerwoman--despite the fact her mother was the country's first female self-made African American millionaire. Privately, elitist lighter-skinned blacks dismissed Walker as "the Mahogany Millionairess." Walker was also quite tolerant of gays among her social set, which also set her at odds with some of Harlem's more conservative hierarchy. Grace Nail Johnson, the wife of novelist James Weldon Johnson and considered the grand dame of Harlem society, remained adamant about never crossing the threshold of Walker's residences nor The Dark Tower.

As the decade waned, Walker continued to entertain lavishly, though years of excessive indulgence of both food and alcohol were taking their toll on her six-foot frame. The parties came to an end, however, with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. The Madam C. J. Walker & Company, with its massive Indianapolis plant and national distribution network, began to feel the impact of the economic misfortune early on. The heiress shuttered The Dark Tower in 1930, and the following year auctioned off some of the antiques and luxuries housed at Villa Lewaro; she also divorced Kennedy. On August 16, 1931, the New York Times announced that Walker had expired in the early morning hours of that same day. Walker had been hosting a birthday party for a friend at a house in Long Branch, New Jersey.

Much of Harlem turned out for Walker's memorable funeral. Noted minister Adam Clayton Powell Sr. eulogized her; college founder Mary McLeod Bethune spoke of the legacy left by both Walker and her mother, and Langston Hughes contributed a poem, "To A'Lelia," which read, in part: "So all who love laughter/And joy and light,/Let your prayers be as roses/For this queen of the night."  When she died in 1931, Hughes wrote that her passing marked the end of the Harlem Renaissance.

 

Source:  http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG97/blues/garber.html
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG97/blues/watson.html
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/923/ALelia_Walker_Harlem_businesswoman
http://www.madamcjwalker.com/alelia.html
http://www.africanpubs.com/Apps/bios/0016WalkerA.asp?pic=none