Annie Turnbo Malone and Poro College

Annie Turnbo was born on 9 August 1869 in Metropolis, Illinois. Around the turn of the twentieth century she developed a hair preparation for Black women, and in 1902 she moved the business to St Louis.^[1]

She is most often mentioned in passing, as the woman whose products Madam C. J. Walker sold as an agent in 1905 and 1906, before starting a company of her own.^[2] Historians of the trade now treat the two as parallel founders of an industry rather than as rivals for a single title, which is the fairer frame for both.^[3]

The business went national after the St Louis World's Fair of 1904.^[4] It sold through the Poro agent system, a network of trained women selling the products and teaching their use, which is the system Walker herself sold into before she started her own company.^[5]

The model answered a real exclusion. The mainstream trade made little for Black customers, and an agent working in homes and salons reached a market the established firms did not serve, while the salon itself became an economic and civic institution in its own right.^[6]

In 1918 she opened Poro College in St Louis. It was a cosmetology school and training centre, it housed the company's operations, and it served as a place where the city's Black community gathered.^[7]

The building was the whole business made visible: the product, the training that sold it, and the community that bought it, under one roof. It made a hair-care company into an institution, the kind of place a city is organised around rather than a place where goods are merely made.

Her wealth is usually given as fourteen million dollars. That figure can be traced to her obituary of 1957, which makes it a starting point for a question rather than an answer to one.^[8] What is documented is that the business was large enough to be fought over. When her husband filed for divorce in 1927 he demanded half of it, and the dispute was settled for two hundred thousand dollars.^[9]

The crash of 1929 and a run of lawsuits followed. In 1930 she moved the headquarters to Chicago, and she died there on 10 May 1957. She gave throughout, to causes including the St Louis Colored Orphans Home.^[9]

The size of the business at its height, in figures that can be checked. Agent numbers and fortunes in this trade were routinely stated by the companies themselves or by obituarists, and the caution that applies to Walker's reported wealth applies equally to Malone's.^[10]