She was one generation away from slavery, had only three months of schooling and founded a company that employed 20,000 agents,” says Judith B. Thomas, president of the Madam Walker Legacy Center in Indianapolis, where Walker built her eponymous beauty business in 1910. That kind of drive, even now, would be amazing. But to think that it came from a woman whose parents were slaves, who was born into poverty and who had worked as a washer woman.