Sarah Breedlove Walker & Sarah Rector: Who was America's first black millionairess?

Often, when people discuss America's first black female millionaire, they're talking about a women named Sarah Breedlove Walker, also known as Madame C.J. Walker. But someone else, another Sarah in fact, may have beaten her. A black girl named Sarah Rector became a millionaire in 1911 or 1912, when she was only 10 years old.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Daddy and I'm Dublin A Charkerboardy. And the
question that we have on the table who was America's
first black millionaires isn't one that you think would be

(00:22):
really up for debate. I mean, most people when they
discuss America's first black female millionaire, they're talking about a
woman named Sarah Breedlove Walker, who's also known as Madam C. J. Walker.
Walker was born in eighteen sixty seven. She was the
daughter of former slaves, and she was raised in a
shack in Louisiana. She however, managed to work her way
all the way up from being a washerwoman to owning

(00:45):
her own multimillion dollar company called Madam C. J. Walker
Manufacturing Company. And kind of the key to her success
was inventing a formula for a product that gave African
American women's smooth, shiny hair, and she did that in
nineteen o five, so really self made woman worked her
way up. Most historians say that Walker became a millionaire

(01:06):
around nineteen fourteen or nineteen fifteen, so she was nearly
fifty years old when she got there. Yeah, she's the
lady who you learn about when you're studying black history
in school. You learn you know, you see her picture,
you'd probably recognize her if you if you saw her,
you'd recognize her advertisements. Even she's very famous even today exactly.
But it's someone else, another person named Sarah. In fact,

(01:29):
how about that Sarah is very popular. This person may
have actually beaten her to the punch and it was
a black girl named Sarah Rector who became a millionaire
somewhere around nineteen eleven or nineteen twelve. And the really
amazing part about this is that she was only ten
years old. And I'm just gonna pause here to say
that a lot of our dates in this podcast come

(01:50):
from an article about Rector that was published in the
Crisis last year. The Crisis is the n Double, a
CP magazine, and it was an article called the Richest
Colored Girl in the World. So we kind of have to,
I guess, just pick one set of dates because there's
a lot of debate about what dates, happened, the win,
the where, everything like that, because there's really not that

(02:10):
much information out there about her. Yeah, not much that
was that was documented. Um, But you know, if we're
going to assume though she's ten years old, it's nineteen eleven,
nineteen twelve. At such a young age, obviously, her wealth
did not come from hard work like Madam C. J. Walker,
from the successful business. Instead, it was the result of

(02:32):
a combination of legislation, oil speculation, and quite obviously a
little bit of good luck. But at the same time,
she didn't have it easy either. She had really humble beginnings.
Her story, though, is a little different from some others
that you might hear about growing up black in North
America around the turn of the twentieth century. She was

(02:53):
born March third, nineteen o two, in Indian Territory, which
would later become the state of Oklahoma in nineteen o seven,
So this was kind of northeast Oklahoma, so you can
think about it that way. And she was born near
the town of Taft, which was an all black town.
But there's something interesting about being born in Indian Territory
at this time because even though she's black by birthright,

(03:15):
she's a member of the Creek Nation. Go figure right.
So here's the background to that. Some Native Americans and
Indian Territory had African slaves prior to the Civil War,
just like some white people did. However, as a result
of the Treaty of eighteen sixty six, which was between
the US government and the five civilized tribes and that
included the Creek, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes,

(03:38):
these tribes had to abolish slavery and make the former slaves,
who were known from that point as freedman, full members
of their tribes, and as such they had quote an
equal interest in the soil. So it was amazing because
blacks finally had their own land. It was a big
landmark thing to happen for them, and they were members
of Indian nations, so kind of a strange combination of

(04:01):
identities here. But soil that that important were there became
really significant in eight seven with the passage of the
DAWs Allotment Act, and basically it was a policy that
did away with communal tribal landholdings in preparation for turning
Indian territory into a state, and the aim was to

(04:22):
absorb tried members into US society. And as a part
of the act, a few things happened. One was reservation lands,
which were of course giant blocks of land, were broken
up into individual parcels that were each in turn given
to individual tribe members. So every tribe member got a

(04:42):
hundred and sixty acres of land. And then once everything
was divided up and everybody got his or her share,
there was a surplus of land that was sold to
white settlers. Yeah, and in this situation, Native Americans and
Black freedmen, they were considered equally when these land arstals
were handed out. So as part of this act, Native

(05:03):
Americans and Black freedmen were considered equally when the land
parcels were actually handed out, And something interesting happened as
part of this. About four thousand, four hundred and seven
black children received nearly one million acres of land in
eastern Oklahoma. So everybody was getting a piece, and they
did too. And since the distribution of these lands lasted

(05:23):
until nineteen o six, Rector was one of those kids
that got some land as well. But just getting the
land isn't what made Rector rich. In fact, a lot
of the land that the Native Americans and freedman ended
up with was considered to be completely worthless. They got
the Rocky hilly stuff, basically the stuff that you couldn't
do anything with, and the land that was considered farmable

(05:44):
and useful was given to white settlers or put up
for white settlers to be able to purchase. I should
make some money off of it. The Rector got her
a little parcel of land when she was about four
years old, and it was located in an area known
as Glenpool, and initially it was a praised is only
being worth five fifty six dollars and fifty cents. I

(06:04):
think that's important to to add that little note in there.
And her dad, Joseph Rector, was just not interested on
owning this property or his daughter owning the property, because
he was going to have to pay taxes on it,
so he tried to sell it off. He petitioned the
Muskogee County Court to u to let him sell it,

(06:24):
but there were restrictions in place about the land, and
he couldn't sell it because Sarah was a minor and
therefore she couldn't legally enter into business contracts. So he
had to keep paying taxes on what everyone thought was
entirely worthless land. And it was a struggle for the
family because they didn't have a lot of money, so
it's really kind of a significant thing. Then. However, in

(06:46):
February nineteen eleven, a businessman named B. B. Jones made
a discovery on Rector's property that kind of changed everything,
and that was loyal Yeah, cu the Beverly Hillbillies. Yeah, definitely. Um.
Much like the dates we have to mention here, exact
figures regarding the income that she ended up getting from
this oil tent to vary, but we can say that

(07:09):
by about nineteen thirteen, her land had already earned around
three hundred thousand dollars and her income was increasing at
a rate of ten thousand per month, so even by
today's standards, a lot of my According to the crisis,
Some national newspapers reported that a nineteen thirteen her income
from oil revenue was as high as fifty thousand dollars
a month, a whole lot of money. And you'd think, then,

(07:32):
if she's bringing in all of this money, her family
would at least be living comfortably, even if if they
didn't have access to all of it, they'd have a
little something going on. But reports had her still living
in a two room shanty with her family, which included
five siblings so tight quarters, they're wearing a cheap dress

(07:52):
and no shoes. Plus she wasn't even in school. So
clearly something had gone terribly wrong if this little girl
could be making so much money and gotten so lucky
with her a lotment of land and she still she's
living in poverty, right, And it didn't really help that
while all this was going on, Rector may have become

(08:12):
an orphan, and we say may have. It doesn't seem
like that should be a question, but we say may
have because some sources say that her mother, Rosa Rector,
had died of tuberculosis a few years prior, and that
her dad reportedly died in prison in nineteen However, there
are some historical articles from the Chicago Defender newspaper that
have her dad dying as late as n so big discrepancy.

(08:36):
But even with her dad in the picture, a white
guardian was appointed to oversee her estate. Well, I think
that's kind of interesting to note that whether her parents
were alive or dad didn't really even matter because there
was going to be this white guardian in the picture. Yeah,
it was really common at the time, and not just
for kids, but also for adult Friedman and Native Americans
whose land turned out to be worth something when the

(08:59):
oil was discovered. The Chicago Defender actually called it the
birth of a new kind of shark quote the oil
grabber Guardian sounds like a shark, definitely. In a book
called The Greatest Gamblers, which is about American oil exploration,
and it's by a woman named Ruth Sheldon Knowles, Sarah
Rector was one of the lucky people in these situations.

(09:20):
Others were cheated out of their lands or even worse.
Um and this is really sad, but the book relates
the story of two other black orphans who had land
allotments in Glenpool. The passage reads, these luckless waives were
murdered in a shock mind with dynamite by a group
of whites who were ready to claim their wealth with
forged documents and false airs. So the situation definitely could

(09:42):
have been worse. But even then things weren't really going well.
But all of a sudden, Sarah Rector had another stroke
of luck. And that was when some people, including a
special agent for the n double a c P in
the U. S. Children's Bureau, started looking into the mismanagement
of her estate. In early nineteen fourteen, so started poking

(10:03):
around and realizing something was definitely wrong here. Also around
the same time, newspapers heard about the little girl's story,
and this photo of her standing in front of the
dirty shanty where she lives started circulating, and Dablina, you
sent me the photo earlier today. It's very sad and
pathetic looking this poor little girl in a tattered dress

(10:26):
standing in front of her her little shanty. Yeah, morose expression,
very adorable, but very sad. So after this investigation started,
the nub a CP got heavily involved in it and
started advocating on her behalf. In fact, people like W. E. B.
Dwo Boys, who was the head of the a c P.
He got interested in her case and really got actively

(10:47):
involved in it. So by October nine, fourteen, they actually
managed to get Rector out of Oklahoma and into school.
There's some discrepancy again over exactly what sort of school
and she received. According to the crisis, records show that
she was at the Children's school at Tuskegee Institute from
December nineteen fourteen to September nineteen fifteen. Booker T. Washington

(11:08):
himself is said to have made the arrangements for her
admission and oversaw her education there, and then later she
went to and graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City.
But some other sources say that she went to high
school and then attended Tuskegee University. So again just a difference,
and I think it might even be semantics here, you know,
what we call Tuskegee today as opposed to what they
called it in the past, and and so forth. But yeah,

(11:31):
who definitely, we do know though that she did attend
Tuskegee at some point, but it didn't exactly solve her problems,
and that was partly because the people managing her estate
weren't doing a very good job of it, and the
people who were trying to help her couldn't get that
control away from her white guardian. They did manage to

(11:52):
get her a little bit, though. They managed to get
her about a thousand dollars a month and some better
clothes to where in the Muskogee County co Wort oversaw
her estate a little more carefully, so there were some
benefits to having all this attention from the media and
from the l A. C P. People, However, just kept
trying to get control of her estate during this time.

(12:12):
Even while she was at Tuskegee, she said to have
received hundreds of letters from white suitors who wanted to
marry her when she came of age. She got about
twenty from Germany, for example, when her story ended up
in a paper there, and people were just professing their
love and wanted to get married to her so that
they could have her fortune. So the people looking out
for her were understandably concerned by all of these declarations

(12:35):
of love pouring in. You know, this young girl might
be led astray. And in fact, the Black press called
on the National Federation of Women's Clubs to make sure
that Sarah wasn't quote honeyed with any love affairs by
fakers and grafters, but that, on the other hand, she
becomes well educated and encouraged to marry one of her
own race. Um, so they're worried she's going to be

(12:57):
taken advantage of even further. And she was lucky that
she had people to look out for her. She manages
to dodge these overtures and makes it to age eighteen.
She's finally of age. He's not a miner anymore, so
she gets some access to her fortune, and it's unclear
exactly how much of her A state that she ultimately received.

(13:17):
A two thousand four article in the Southeast Missouri and
says that she eventually got three million. However, a Chicago
Defender piece said that there was really no exact figure available,
so it kind of fluctuates what you see of what
she got gets the substantial sum that regardless of what
the exact figure was. But at nineteen, she bought this
huge mansion at two thousand East twelveth Street in Kansas City, Missouri. Uh,

(13:42):
and that's where she settled with her family. They finally
could move out of the more humbler abodes they had
been living in, and it seemed like things were finally
looking up for her. You know, she's getting to use
this money she's so luckily gotten. Um. But then unfortunately
Missouri changed its legal majority age from eighteen to twenty one.

(14:04):
So sorry, Sarah, but you're back to being a miner again.
So at this point, her white quote friends, and you
see that written that way a lot of times, referring
to her friends quote unquote in Oklahoma. Some of these
folks once again stepped into the picture. They stepped up
to take advantage of her situation. And specifically a guy

(14:24):
named Jim Collins petitioned the court for guardianship of Sarah
and said basically that she wasn't competent enough to manage
her a state, even though she had attended high school
and was educated. A judge in a white court however,
at that point denied his petition after reviewing everything, he
really felt that she had handled everything well. His exact
quote was that she has handled the more than seven

(14:47):
hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of property she owns
with such a stuteness. And he also ruled that she
was mentally sound enough to not need a guardian and
complimented her intelligence and thrift. So talk about that thrift
a little here. But um, finally, though, with this judge
is ruling, Rector was able to control what was rightfully

(15:09):
hers and um, even though you know the judge's assessment
wasn't totally on par, at least the thrift part. Yeah,
we don't know too much about her adult life, but
what we do know is that she wasn't exactly conservative
with her fortune. She loved fancy cars and she left
to drive them really fast. She bought a Limo hutmobile

(15:31):
and a silver plated Lincoln and silver plated pretty fancy.
I just want to emphasize that for everybody, Sarah's obsessed
with the silver plated Lincoln. Everyone. I kind of am obsessed,
I guess because I'm just wondering. I mean, what do
you have to do to keep your silver plated car
looking good? Polish? Yeah, well, if she didn't have to work,

(15:52):
then she wouldn't have had time on her hands, so
maybe she got to polish her car a lot. I
don't know, driving around the block. Regardless, she used to
surround town a lot in both the Hutmobile and the
silver plated Lincoln, and this was a time when it
wasn't at all common for African American women to be
behind the wheel, so kind of breaking down some boundaries
right off the bat. She also loved clothes. She apparently

(16:12):
had a taste for European gowns, and she was also
a frequent customer of a downtown jeweler, so she liked
diamonds as well. She liked fancy thing so at twenty,
she married a guy named Kenneth Campbell, who eventually became
a partner of a very successful local African American business
or a businessman named Homer B. Roberts, who interestingly was

(16:35):
one of her maybe the first African American auto dealer
in the United States. I'm guessing that Kenneth Campbell kind
of shared Sarah's love of the silver plated land maybe,
so maybe that's how she got her car deals and
she picked him up one day. So Sarah and Kenneth
they threw lavish parties at their home, entertaining the likes

(16:56):
of musicians Duke Ellington and Count Basie and boxers like
Joe Louison Jack Johnson. So definitely different from the other
millionaires we discussed earlier in the podcast. Madam c. J.
Walker Walker spent a lot of her money on philanthropy. However,
some sources do say that in addition to having her
limo and driver take her three kids to school, Rector

(17:16):
also had the limo and the chauffeur take some neighborhood
kids to local elementary school. So a little mix of things.
And I mean, I can't help but think a little
of Madam C. J. Walker's daughter too. I think she
was sort of known more for the the high life,
hanging out with with fancy people and buying fancy thing
it was a player in the Harlem Harlem Renaissance, right, definitely.

(17:39):
So you know they I guess between these two women,
they're kind of skirting both worlds. Yeah, they both skirted
both worlds, and they both made a difference in their
communities kind of in their own way. For example, in
a book called Take Up the Black Man's Burden, which
is about Kansas City's African American community and it's by
Charles E. Coulter, he notes how Rector used her wealth,

(18:02):
at least in the nineteen twenties to overcome obstacles facing
other African Americans at the time. So what this means.
One example of how she did this was by ignoring
Jim Crow conventions or basically ignoring them in downtown clothing stores,
she was one of the few and maybe the only
African American woman who could try on her clothes before
purchasing them. I think that's pretty amazing. I mean, that

(18:24):
sounds like a small thing, but that's that could make
a really big difference in how people in your community
were perceived. But a lot of sources indicate that Rector
ended up spending a lot of her estate, and I mean,
I guess that's not too hard to imagine with all
of these cars and European clothes and jewels and the
fancy house. But according to the Southeast Misserin article, that

(18:48):
was due in large part not to to all this
fine taste, but to her taste for gambling. Yeah, she
ended up having to sell her mansion and her husband
divorced her. According to some sources, she also ended up
moving back to Oklahoma for a time with her kids
and passed away eventually in nineteen sixty seven. So, I
know that seems like we just kind of rushed at

(19:09):
the end of her life. But as we said, there's
really no definitive biography out there about her. Um, so
a lot of the details are pretty fuzzy. Yeah, kind
of an unglamorous founding end though for a millionaires. Yes,
But it does seem like her kind of triumph was
in not really suffering the same fate that the other
black children during that time in Oklahoma did well and

(19:31):
becoming a poster child for this problem, to this this
land problem. Um in helping other kids get their their rights. Yeah,
and she for a time she got to kind of
live how she wanted as she wanted, you know, she
said the where the when, And that's something definitely, so

(19:55):
there may be a little more research in the works
about her. The Southeast Missournant article that we reference a
lot in this story is actually about a woman named
Jerry Sanders who has done a lot of research on
Rector's life. And I think she's written a little like
a chapter in a book about Homer b. Roberts, the
man that we mentioned before. And I know that there
are others doing research on her, so hopefully there will
be some kind of definitive biography, and it would it

(20:16):
would be great too to hear a little more of
Sarah Rector's and voice. I mean, I think you were
mentioning earlier that kind of reminded you of Ellen Craft
a little bit. You know, it's clearly ellen craft story.
She's the one in the amazing disguise, She's the one
trying to keep her identity under wraps, but when we
read her narrative, we don't get too much of that.

(20:36):
And I mean I kind of felt the same way
with this story. Clearly Sarah Rector, she's the central figure,
but we don't know much about her. Yeah, the only
direct quote I saw from her was in the Southeast
Missourian article, and it relates how she would get pulled
over sometimes for speeding and defiantly say to the officers
who pulled her over, do you know who I am? Like?

(20:58):
I like that. I think the pretty I guess if
you're gonna leave just one quote, one available quote, but
the good one. Yeah, displays some self confidence that she had,
and that I mean, I think it kind of says,
what the stories about? Do you know who I am? Yes,
people knew who she was, and that was a big
deal in the nineteen twenties, and now hopefully you guys
know who she is too. I mean, I had never

(21:20):
heard of her before. So um, it's it's definitely been
an interesting story to learn about. Yeah, one that we
want to learn more about. And not just her story,
as we said, but the other children who are in
the same situation as her in Oklahoma during this time period.
So I think there was another little boy named Danny
Tucker who also made some money and managed to escape
being kidnapped or murdered or you know, otherwise separated from

(21:42):
his fortune. So if you know any stories related to
this one, um or anything else to add about Kansas
City in the nineteen twenties. You can write us at
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(22:06):
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