Beauty culture: trained in Indianapolis, practiced on Hanna Street

Early — mid twentieth century

The Walker system, at Fort Wayne distance: Madam C. J. Walker herself was Indianapolis — her factory, her fortune, and her training school stood there, not here, and this record does not move them. What reached Fort Wayne was her system of trained Black women operators, and it is documented in one preserved life. Ethel Clemons of Fort Wayne, in an oral history recorded with her husband William by Teresa C. Klasen and held by the Filson Historical Society, told how she traveled from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis to attend the Madam C. J. Walker Beauty School, and how she then owned a beauty shop of her own on Hanna Street in Fort Wayne. That is the shape of the city's Black beauty-culture record as the sources reached preserve it: not a branch plant but a route — a Fort Wayne woman taking the interurban-era trip to the Walker school, bringing the training home, and practicing it as a proprietor on one of the near-southeast side's own streets. Beauty work stayed a Fort Wayne trade into the present — a cosmetology academy operates on Coldwater Road today, teaching the same arts under modern licensing — but for the historic period the named, sourced record is Clemons's, and it is printed at the size the evidence supports.

Sources:

1. Filson Historical Society digital collections — catalog record of the oral history interview with Ethel Clemons and William Clemons (interviewer Teresa C. Klasen): the Fort Wayne–Indianapolis trip, the Madam C. J. Walker Beauty School attendance, and the beauty shop on Hanna Street.
2. The Salon Professional Academy, Fort Wayne — the present-day cosmetology school on Coldwater Road, as the trade's current institutional form.