05/18/2024
If you thought Madam C. J. Walker was the first black millionaire, think again. Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone (August 9, 1869 – May 10, 1957) was the real first millionaire businesswoman and with no tragic end to her story. Annie Malone was a chemist entrepreneur, philanthropist, educator and lived up until the grand age of 87.
By the beginning of the 1900s, Turnbo moved with her older siblings to Lovejoy, now known as Brooklyn, Illinois. While experimenting with hair and different hair-care products, she developed and manufactured her own line of non-damaging hair straighteners, special oils, and hair-stimulant products for African-American women. She named her new product “Wonderful Hair Grower”. To promote her new product, Turnbo sold the Wonderful Hair Grower in bottles door-to-door. Her products and sales began to revolutionize hair-care methods for all African Americans.
In 1902, Turnbo moved to a thriving St. Louis, where she and three employees sold her hair-care products door-to-door. As part of her marketing, she gave away free treatments to attract more customers.
Due to the high demand for her product in St. Louis, Turnbo opened her first shop in 1902 at 2223 Market Street. She also launched a wide advertising campaign in the black press, held news conferences, toured many southern states, and recruited many women whom she trained to sell her products.
One of her selling agents, Sarah Breedlove Davis, later known as Madam C. J. Walker, operated first in St. Louis and later in Denver, Colorado, until a disagreement led Walker to leave the company. Walker allegedly took the original Poro formula and created her own brand of it (this is disputed). This development was one of the reasons which led then Turnbo to copyright her products under the name "Poro" because of what she called fraudulent imitations and to discourage counterfeit versions. Poro may have received this name from a Mende word for devotional society or it may be a combination of the married names of Annie Pope and her sister Laura Roberts. Due to the growth in her business, in 1910 Turnbo moved to a larger facility on 3100 Pine Street
