Madam CJ Walker: 'An Inspiration to Us All'

When American journalist A'Lelia Bundles published her first article about her great-great grandmother, Madam CJ Walker in 1982, it was in the "lost women" column of a women's magazine.

That marked quite a comedown for Mrs Walker, who founded a haircare business that made her the country's first self-made female millionaire -"the world's wealthiest coloured woman, the foremost manufacturer and philanthropist of her race", as one newspaper described her when she died in 1919.

To this day, Madam CJ Walker products can be purchased in stores - an unlikely legacy for a woman who toiled in poverty for decades and whose parents had been enslaved.

But "for many years Madam Walker was just a little footnote in history. As a woman who made haircare products, she was really consigned to something trivial," says Ms Bundles, who published the first full-length biography of Mrs Walker, "On Her Own Ground" in 2001.

Now, however, Ms Walker is "having a moment", as Ms Bundles put it in a recent blog post.

Her story can be found in some 200 books, she's been featured in several recent museum exhibits, including at the Simthsonian in Washington DC, and New York named a street in her honour last year. In March, Netflix released Self-made, a four-part series starring Octavia Spencer about her life and business, inspiring another publicity blitz - and the re-issuing of Ms Bundles' biography.