Walker, A'Lelia

June 6, 1885
August 17, 1931

Through the lavish parties she hosted, entrepreneur A'Lelia Walker made herself the center of elite social life during the Harlem Renaissance. She was born Lelia Walker to Sarah and Moses McWilliams in Vicksburg, Mississippi. (She changed her name to "A'Lelia" as an adult.) After her father died when she was two, her mother took her to St. Louis. She attended public schools there and graduated from Knoxville College, a private black school in Knoxville, Tennessee.

She and her mother then moved to Denver, where her mother married C. J. Walker, from whom they took their surnames. A'Lelia also married, but although she took the surname Robinson from her husband, she only occasionally used it, and the marriage was as short-lived as two subsequent unions. While in Denver, the Walkers began their hair-care business. Madam C. J. Walker developed products that straightened and softened African-American women's hair, and assisted by her daughter, she quickly created a vast empire. She moved parts of her operations and her residence to Pittsburgh and Indianapolis before finally settling in New York. In 1917 the Walkers built a thirty-four-room mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, which A'Lelia's friend, the opera singer Enrico Caruso, dubbed "Villa Lewaro" (short for Lelia Walker Robinson).

With her mother's death on May 25, 1919, A'Lelia inherited the bulk of her mother's estate, including Villa Lewaro and two twin brownstones at 108–110 West 136th Street in Harlem. Soon after her mother's death, Walker also bought an apartment at 80 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. While she was the titular director of the Walker business interests, A'Lelia Walker devoted most of her money and attention to social life. She threw parties at Villa Lewaro and in Harlem. She established "at-homes" at which she introduced African-American writers, artists, and performers to each other and to such white celebrities as photographer Carl Van Vechten. Her "salon" was regarded as a place where artistic people, particularly male and female homosexuals, could go to eat, drink, and hear music. In 1927 and 1928, she turned part of the brown-stones into a nightclub, which she named "The Dark Tower."

When the Depression came, Walker experienced grave financial difficulties. She was forced to close her nightclub, and she mortgaged Villa Lewaro. When she died suddenly on August 17, 1931, poet Langston Hughes wrote that this "was really the end of the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem." The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to which Walker had willed Villa Lewaro, was unable to keep up the payments on the estate and ended up putting it on the auction block.

See also Hair and Beauty Culture in the United States; Harlem Renaissance; Walker, Madam C. J.

Bibliography

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Neihart, Ben. Rough Amusements: The True Story of A'Lelia Walker, Patroness of the Harlem Renaissance's Down-Low Culture. New York: Bloomsbury, 2003.

siraj ahmed (1996)
Updated bibliography