Black Fortunes_The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires by Shomari Wills

Author:Shomari Wills [Wills, Shomari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-01-29T21:00:00+00:00

THE WORLD’S FAIR BEGAN ON APRIL 30, 1904, HAVING BEEN POSTPONED a year due to its growing in scope and size. The event was staged on a 1,272-acre park in the middle of the city. President Theodore Roosevelt attended the fair along with more than two hundred thousand Missourians and tourists from all over the country and the world. There were nine hundred buildings made of white stone, statues, man-made lakes, a zoo, and villages where Apache Indians, Congolese Pygmies, and Filipinos lived in huts and tepees and wore tribal garb. The grounds, which were interconnected by looping dirt roads, curved through the grass. There was also a train, which visitors could ride for ten cents.

Annie, at thirty-four years of age, had never left the Midwest. The World’s Fair, however, brought the world to her. At the fair Annie met black tourists from the South, the West, the East, and the Caribbean and pitched their selling her products in their hometowns. She used the opportunity to begin building a national sales network and take her company from a regional business to a global brand.

Annie visited the fair as often as she could for the year it ran. She was particularly fascinated with the exhibit of Africans at the fair called “African Wilds.” The exhibit spanned more than 40 acres of the park. There, hundreds of African men, women, and children lived in huts made of sticks and leaves and dressed in loincloths. Around this time, she named her company Poro Products. She chose the name, in part, because it sounded like an African word, and Annie was fascinated with the continent of the tribesmen at the fair and her ancestors.

Shortly after the World’s Fair, Sarah Breedlove met with Annie to tell her she was moving to Denver, Colorado. Her hair had grown back in and was full and thick. She offered to sell Annie’s product in Colorado. Annie agreed that it was a good idea and wished her well in her travels. She did not have a sales rep in Colorado, whose black population was growing rapidly as so-called Exodusters, black refugees from the Jim Crow South, were settling there by the hundreds.

Breedlove took the train to Denver with her daughter, her belongings, and a supply of Poro products to sell. She sold Poro products in her new city and worked part-time as a laundress. A few months into her move, her boyfriend from St. Louis, a traveling salesman named Charles James “C. J.” Walker, moved to Denver. They married a few months later. Charles convinced his new wife that she should stop selling Annie’s products and they should start their own line. Annie hadn’t trademarked the name or the formulas and was powerless to stop the copycatting.

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