Annie Malone

Annie Turnbo Malone was born in Metropolis, Illinois, in 1869, to formerly enslaved parents.¹ She moved to Lovejoy (now Brooklyn), Illinois, and then to St. Louis, where she began developing and selling hair care products for Black women around 1900.¹ She hired and trained a nationwide network of Poro agents — who sold her products and offered hair care services — before founding Poro College in St. Louis in 1918.²

Madam C.J. Walker — then Sarah Breedlove — was one of Malone's agents and received early training in the Poro system before developing her own competing line.¹ Walker's subsequent success has historically overshadowed Malone's foundational work, though it is documented that Walker built on the commercial model and manufacturing knowledge she gained as a Poro agent.

Poro College

Poro College — opened in 1918 in St. Louis — was a substantial campus: it employed 175 people on-campus, trained agents nationwide, and at its peak served a network of approximately 75,000 agents across the country.² Malone's philanthropic contributions to St. Louis's Black community exceeded $4 million over her lifetime, including major gifts to the St. Louis Colored Orphans' Home.²

A series of legal and financial difficulties — a costly divorce settlement, IRS disputes, and the Great Depression's impact on the beauty market — eroded Malone's fortune over the 1930s and 1940s. She died in 1957 in Chicago in reduced circumstances.¹ Walker, who died in 1919 at the peak of her success, is the name American history preserved. Malone — who built earlier, trained Walker, and built more institutions — died largely forgotten.

Malone built Poro College at a time when the beauty industry for Black women was essentially non-existent as a formal commercial category. The products that existed were often damaging, inappropriate, or absent entirely. She was building the product and the distribution network simultaneously while navigating Jim Crow St. Louis — a city with formal and informal racial exclusions that constrained access to banking, commercial real estate, and supply chain relationships.

Her relationship with Madam C.J. Walker — employer, mentor, and eventually competitor — represents a second structural constraint: the market she demonstrated existed attracted competitors, including the woman she trained. The demonstration cost (building Poro College, proving the market, training agents) was paid by Malone. Some of the market value her demonstration created was captured by Walker.

Peak Wealth; Impoverishment; Forgotten

At her peak in the 1920s, Malone's Poro College was a substantial campus employing 175 people and operating a nationwide agent network. She was one of the wealthiest Black Americans of her era and a major philanthropist in St. Louis's Black community. A series of events — a costly divorce settlement, IRS disputes, the Depression's impact on the beauty market — eroded her fortune over the 1930s and 1940s. She died in 1957 in Chicago in reduced circumstances.

The historical record that preserved Walker's name did not equally preserve Malone's. Walker's story has the narrative arc that the historical record favors: born into poverty, rags to riches, died at the peak of her success. Malone's story ends in impoverishment — a less celebrated ending that her role as Walker's predecessor and teacher makes more, not less, significant. This platform names her because the record's omissions are as instructive as its inclusions.