A’lelia Walker Wilson’s business trip

Our fourteenth February 1922 post to mark Black History Month 2022

One hundred years ago today … A’lelia Walker Wilson, president of the CJ Walker Manufacturing Company, was in the midst of a business trip that included stops in France, Egypt, Liberia, and Italy. The Age reported her arrival in Cairo:

Mrs. Lelia Walker Wilson of New York City… has arrived here after a delightful trip over the Mediterranean sea, coming from Nice, France. Mrs. Wilson spent several weeks in France, her first point of disembarkation after leaving her New York home. Her itinerary has been planned so that her stay in Cairo will be occupied in part with side trips into the interior, including visits to the Sphinx, the Pyramids, to the Libyan desert. a ride down the historic Nile to the famed Cataracts, and a stop at Alexandria, where she will confer with the Egyptian and North African representatives of the Walker company. The objective of her tour will take her to the West Coast, where, at Monrovia, Liberia, she will be a guest of honor of President C D B King at the governmental mansion.

(“MRS. WILSON IN CAIRO, ENROUTE TO LIBERIA,” New York Age, 4 March 1922, p. 2) 

Walker’s appearance in Rome would cause a bit of a stir, judging from the Buffalo American’s report, worth reprinting in its entirety for its attempt to fawn over Walker, betrayed by primativist rhetoric, and for its extensive quoting from a contemporary Italian account of her sighting.

Buffalo American, 9 March 1922, p. 3. Newspapers.com.

Just to highlight a quoted passage from La Tribuna:

The black Race has truly sent us a charming representative in the person of Mrs. Lelia Wilson of New York. Her ancestors surely not so long ago, must have been rulers of the virgin equatorial forests between the Gulf of Guinea and Mozambique. Therefore, it goes without saying, that Mrs. Wilson is assuredly a Queen.

Walker had made news earlier in February, 1922 for her philanthropy, having given a thousand dollars to the National Child Welfare Agency “to aid in its work among the colored children of the country” (“Mrs. Wilson donates $1,000 to Welfare Ass’n,” New York Age, 11 Feb. 1922, p. 1).

Note: we previously featured Walker, whose incredibly successful company had been founded by her mother, in our post of November 13th, 1920 about the CJ Walker Manufacturing Company. 

– Jonathan Goldman, Feb. 28, 2022

TAGS: Black Business, African American women, entrepreneur, racism, news, travel