Harvard Author Spotlight: A’Lelia Bundles ’74 Understands the Power of Storytelling

Journalist and author A’Lelia Bundles ’74 has just submitted the second-to-last chapter of her forthcoming book to her editor, and she’s looking forward to celebrating its publication early next year. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, Bundles discussed her latest work, her time at Harvard, and her writing process.

Bundles’s next book is a biography of her great-grandmother A’Lelia Walker, a businesswoman and patron of the arts during the Harlem Renaissance. She was known for throwing renowned parties in her townhouse on 136th Street, striving to create a space for Black artists to create and commune together. A’Lelia Walker shared this love of art with her mother, Madam C.J. Walker, the Black hair care pioneer who is widely recognized as the first female self-made millionaire. Bundles’s first book was a biography of her great-great-grandmother entitled “On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker,” published in 2001. Bundles also serves as the brand historian for the hair care line MADAM by Madam C.J. Walker, which is owned by Sundial Brands.

Despite this impressive family history and the two biographies she’s written, Bundles didn’t grow up with her world revolving around the notoriety of Walker. Unsurprisingly, her parents were also in the hair care business, but she didn’t feel particularly attached to it herself.

“My life was very much steeped in Black hair care, but Madam Walker was not in any way the center of my life,” Bundles affirmed. Still, there were little reminders of her everywhere that her family had inherited — monogrammed silverware, china, and a baby grand piano that belonged to Walker’s daughter.

“The last thing I thought I would be doing at this stage in my life is Madam Walker. The hair care thing was my parents’ thing. I wanted to be a journalist. And that’s what I did for 30 years,” Bundles said. She served as a news executive and producer for both NBC and ABC.

Bundles expressed gratitude that her parents never pressured her to join the family business. “It was really important that I developed my own identity, and that I followed my own interests,” she said.

Bundles shared that writing has always been a key part of who she is. She was editor of her junior high school paper and co-editor for her high school paper. She went on to attend Radcliffe/Harvard for her undergraduate years — when the colleges gave out joint degrees to women — but she consciously decided not to join The Harvard Crimson.

“At that point, there had maybe been a couple of Black women who were working for The Crimson. And the stories that I heard from people made it sound like there was more hazing than actual reporting going on,” she said. She opted instead to join what she viewed as a more welcoming space: the jazz department of the college’s radio station WHRB, a different avenue to introduce her to the world of media.

Bundles entered college in the late ’60s — “when people were going from perms to afros,” she noted. After several years of perming her hair, she wanted an afro too, though her father — like many other parents at the time — was disapproving. There was a “generational gap,” and her father worried that an afro might only make her life harder. Still, with more support from her mother, she got the afro anyway, and when she arrived in Cambridge for her freshman year, most other Black women had one too.

At this point in time, there was a common misconception that Madam C.J. Walker had invented the hot comb, and some Black people looked down on her legacy for “wanting to turn Black folks white.” As Bundles began college at a time when young Black women were trading in flat irons and chemicals for afro picks, the idea that Walker had promoted straightening hair was a source of tension for Bundles.

Then one day deep in the stacks of Widener Library, she happened to stumble upon an obituary of Walker written by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1919. It was filled with praise, and it was then that Bundles began to rethink her conflicting feelings about her great-great-grandmother. Years later, while at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, she was talking about potential paper topics with her advisor Phyllis Garland, the only Black woman on the faculty in the fall of 1975.

“Your name is A’Lelia. Do you have any connection to Madam Walker and A’Lelia Walker?” Garland asked.

“Yeah, that’s my family.”

“That’s what you’re going to write about.”

Bundles cited this conversation as a critical moment. In the mid-’70s, books published by or about Black women were rare. Beyond releases from prominent names like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Black women were largely underrepresented.

“The world was not saying ‘please write this book,’” Bundles said. Her biography on Walker wouldn’t be released until 2001, but it was at Columbia that she first began to do deep research on her family.

Across all her work promoting the legacy of Madam C.J. Walker, Bundles has been committed to telling Walker’s story authentically. Too often, she lamented, the stories of marginalized people either remain untold or are misrepresented. Bundles has been passionate about putting in the work to tell Walker’s story with the accuracy and fullness it deserves. She feels particularly strongly about this in light of the 2020 Netflix series “Self Made” starring Octavia Spencer, which was inspired by Bundles’s biography of Walker. She wasn’t allowed as much control over the script as she would have liked, and she has publicly expressed her disappointment with the creative liberties taken in the making of the series. This includes the series’ emphasis on a rivalry between Walker and a character based on another Black business woman named Annie Malone; Bundles believes this rivalry was not only overdramatized but portrayed Walker as pitting herself against other Black women when she was actually invested in lifting them up.

In her own work, Bundles had access to a great many resources to help her tell her ancestors’ stories accurately. Her grandfather “saved everything,” and she’s also grateful that she could talk to people that personally knew Walker before they passed away. She had thousands of records to go through — letters to read, connections to draw, and relationships to decipher between Walker and iconic figures like Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and A. Philip Randolph. She went to courthouses and libraries in her free time. She traveled to 12 different cities. She examined copies of the Chicago Defender on microfilm. She did her research.

Bundles contemplated the process of writing “On Her Own Ground” and what it meant to her. “It’s being able to tell the story not just of a woman who created hair care products, but of a woman who provided employment for thousands of Black women who otherwise would have been sharecroppers and domestic workers,” she said. She also finds comfort in the fact that the children of those women had greater opportunities — to buy homes, to become educated, to become activists.

Bundles reflected on her forthcoming book on A’Lelia Walker as well. “I’m very happy with the story that I’m telling because it will clear up a lot of caricatures and flattening of A’Lelia Walker, and also tell a lot of other dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance.”

Bundles hopes that her books are not only authentic accounts of the lives of the women that came before her, but that they also educate readers on underrepresented time periods and communities.

“I write the books that I wish had been written for me. I wish I had had these stories when I was in junior high and high school about Black women who lived in America between the Civil War and the Depression. To reframe how we understand who we are as a people.” Bundles said.

“And that’s important to me, that I’m filling in the blanks. I’m always really gratified when people tell me ‘Oh, I learned so much history when I read your book.’ [...] What I’m doing, secretly, is giving people history lessons but also trying to tell them about an interesting person. Creating historical context is really important to me.”

As for what she's looking forward to next?

“You know, I’m really excited about finishing this book and having book parties,” she said with a laugh.

—Staff writer Jaden S. Thompson can be reached at jaden.thompson@thecrimson.com.