What was Madam C.J. Walker’s childhood like?

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Walker was born Sarah Breedlove on the same cotton plantation where her parents, Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, had been enslaved before the American Civil War. She was the first in her family born after the Emancipation Proclamation. Having been orphaned at age 7, she married at 14, she said, to escape a brother-in-law’s abuse.