Pillar Award Spotlight: A'Lelia Bundles
A’Lelia Bundles looks through archival photos of Madam C.J. Walker and the home she built in Irvington, NY, while on site at Villa Lewaro.
For A’Lelia Bundles, preservation is personal. She began researching her family about 50 years ago — and through her publications, archives, and advocacy, she has made their stories resonate in countless ways. A’Lelia is the great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker. Her great-grandmother and namesake was Madam Walker’s daughter, A’Lelia Walker. By telling the stories of these incredible women, she is staking a claim for the importance of celebrating women of color, making sure they are not left out of our collective history.
A’Lelia holds a black and white photo showing the 1924 convention of Madam Walker’s sales agents. It shows several hundred women posing around Villa Lewaro’s terrace. According to A’Lelia, Madam Walker’s goal was to inspire women and provide an avenue for them to find economic stability.
A’Lelia grew up in Indianapolis, but from an early age she knew she wanted to live in New York. She first made her way to the east coast to attend college at Harvard University, but ended up in New York City as a graduate student in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The close proximity to Harlem strengthened the connection she felt both to New York and to her great- and great-great-grandmothers. This is when she first began researching her family.
In 2001, she published On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker. This New York Times Notable Book about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother provided the inspiration for Self Made, a fictionalized adaptation that premiered on Netflix in March 2020. Madam Walker was the first self made woman millionaire, famous for her line of hair care products. Her home in Irvington, Villa Lewaro, is a testament to female entrepreneurship and an important landmark associated with Black and Women’s history. A’Lelia has worked tirelessly to tell the story of Madam Walker, making her come alive through her research. She is currently working on her fifth book, The Joy Goddess of Harlem: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, a biography of her great-grandmother “whose parties, arts patronage and international travels helped define that era.”
A’Lelia Bundles is an award-winning journalist, founder of the Madam Walker Family Archives, Madam C.J. Walker’s biographer — and this year, a Pillar of New York. The League is proud to honor her with this award and we look forward to celebrating her and her remarkable contributions to the field of historic preservation during our award ceremony on April 5. We hope you will join us!
In February 2022, A’Lelia Bundles was named the inaugural Center for Africana Studies and Culture Prestigious Fellow in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. She is the founder of the Madam Walker Family Archives, the largest private collection of Walker photographs and memorabilia. A’Lelia is brand historian for MADAM by Madam C. J. Walker, a line of hair care products developed in partnership with Sundial Brands and Walmart.
She is a vice chair emerita of Columbia University’s Board of Trustees and chair emerita of the board of the National Archives Foundation. She is a member of several boards that reflect her interest in history, journalism, political activism, social justice and historic preservation including the March on Washington Film Festival, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Indiana Landmarks, Columbia Global Reports and the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative.
A’Lelia was a network television news executive and producer for thirty years at NBC News and then at ABC News, where she was Washington, DC deputy bureau chief and director of talent development.
Her articles and essays have been published in the New York Times Book Review, Variety, TheUndefeated.com, Al Jazeera, Parade, Ms., O Magazine, Essence, several encyclopedias and books. As a speaker and emcee, she has appeared at universities, corporations and book festivals, as well as on ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, PBS and BBC. She has served as an advisor for numerous documentaries, museum exhibits, biographies, scholarly papers and history texts.
A recipient of an Emmy and a du Pont Gold Baton, she has participated in writing residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and received a masters degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram.