Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance

Dubbed the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s” by poet Langston Hughes, A’Lelia Walker, daughter of millionaire entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker, and author A’Lelia Bundles’s great-grandmother and namesake, is a fascinating figure whose legendary parties and “Dark Tower” salon helped define the Harlem Renaissance. After inheriting her mother’s hair-care enterprise, A’Lelia Walker would become America’s first high-profile black heiress and a prominent patron of the arts. Joy Goddess takes readers inside her three New York homes—a mansion, a townhouse, and a pied-à-terre—where she entertained Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, James Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, W.E.B. DuBois, and other cultural, social, and intellectual luminaries of the Roaring Twenties.

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 A’Lelia Bundles is a former trustee of Columbia University for whom the A’Lelia Bundles Community Scholars Program, which is administered by the Columbia University School of Professional Studies and Office of Public Affairs, is named. She is the author of five books, including Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance and On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, a New York Times Notable Book about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother—, is the fact-based biography that inspired Self Made, a fictional four-part Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer. Bundles is a board member of the March On! Festival, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, BIO (Biographers International), Columbia Global Reports and the National Archives Foundation. She founded the Madam Walker Family Archives, the largest private collection of Walker ephemera, photographs, and correspondence. Bundles was a network television producer for 30 years, first at NBC News and then at ABC News, where she was Washington, D.C., deputy bureau chief and director of talent development.

Eric K. Washington is a former Columbia University A’Lelia Bundles Community Scholar. He was a Leon Levy Biography Fellow in 2015–16, when he worked on his book Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal (Liveright, 2019), which was lauded as “an illuminating chronicle” (Edward Kosner, WSJ) that invoked “a fitting exemplar of Harlem’s ambitious Black middle class” (PW). His book won Columbia University’s Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship of New York History, the Guides Association of New York City’s GANYC Apple Award, and special recognition from the Municipal Art Society of New York’s Brendan Gill Prize committee. He is a board member of the Biographers International Organization (BIO) and chairs its annual Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, awarded for a biography-in-progress on an African American figure.

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