April 20, 1906, Autograph Letter Signed to Mr. and Mrs. Lyon, 2 pp. as a student at Hampton Institute in Virginia, mentioning its white President, Civil War General Armstrong, and Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee. Four years later, Brokenburr, as a young lawyer, incorporated the cosmetics company of Madame C.J.Walker which became the most successful African-American business in the United States.
Brokenburr writes: “I write to express my gratefulness to you for the present you sent me… the greatest surprise that I have had this year… a better selection could not have been made for me, because these two books I have long desired. I, like all Hampton people, am very interested in Tuskegee and its progress. And of course any Hampton student is eager to learn everything possible about General Armstrong, the member of your race who gave his life for the benefit of my race, the race with its future before it. I read the ‘Commands’. I shall make an effort to obey them…thank you again for the beautiful present.” There was, indeed, a brilliant future ahead for this 20 year-old son of a former slave who was about to graduate from Hampton, the “historically-Black” university first headed by Civil War General Samuel Armstrong, where Booker T. Washington had once studied. From Hampton, Brokenburr went on to Howard University, where he received his law degree in 1909, then putting out his shingle as an attorney in Indianapolis. There he met and became a close friend and advisor to Madam C.J. Walker, who had moved from Pittsburgh to pursue her dream of establishing a company to develop and market beauty and hair products for Black women. It was Brokenburr who, in 1910, drew up and filed the incorporation papers for the cosmetics company that made Madame Walker the first African-American woman millionaire. Brokenburr remained legal advisor to the company for the rest of his life, much later becoming Chairman of the Board, while, meanwhile crusading for civil rights litigation and being elected in 1940 as Indiana’s first African-American state Senator. Brokenburr letters are very scarce, only a small collection being held by the Indiana Historical Society - and are virtually non-existent from this early period of his life.