This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

Up next we have the story of Madam C.J. Walker.

Many believe that she was the first female, self-made millionaire, and she just happens to be African American. He was also the first

person to bring hair care products to the masses. Here to tell her story is her great, great

granddaughter, an author of the book, On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of

Madam C.J. Walker. Here's Aalelia Bundles. She started life as Sarah Breed Love on the same

plantation in Delta, Louisiana, where her parents had been enslaved.

And she was the first child in her family born free in December of 1867.

They lived in an area that had been devastated by the Civil War.

Everything, the plantations had been burned down.

And now the formerly enslaved people were

struggling to just live a life. And they had very little money at the end of every season.

They owed money to the plantation owners who had been their former slave owners. And Sarah Breed

Love as the young child in her family, she had had very little formal education.

There were schools for black children in Louisiana, even though her family minister, Curtis

Pollard had been a black state senator during reconstruction when African Americans had gained

a great deal of political power,

that power was taken away from them by the Ku Klux Klan,

so that by the time Sarah was old enough to go to school, there were no schools for black

children.

She knows how to pick cotton.

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