Being Muslim. Sylvia Chan-Malik
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that refuses to talk, feet that refuse to walk). Thus, despite the formal end of slavery, the woman in Smith’s song is ironically not “Chicago bound” but instead still bound to the legacies of slavery and anti-Black racism in the South. In these lyrics, we see that, for all its promise, Chicago is also a signifier of the pain and violence of the Great Migration, a “mecca” where the racial and gendered traumas of slavery are not resolved but displaced and diffused in the urban North. Indeed, while Smith’s abandoned protagonist commits suicide down South, where her body remains, the news of her death travels far and wide, a “big red headline” for all across the North and South to see.
To Chicago’s Mecca, into its endless promise and new forms of pain, a young Black American woman named Florence Watts arrived sometime around 1910. In the photo of the Four American Moslem Ladies, Florence is likely the woman seated on the right, with white stockings and white flowers on her hat, her feet slightly dangling off the floor. This is not entirely clear, however, as the caption reads that the women are named from “right to left.” Right to left is the orientation for reading Urdu or Arabic script, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq’s native language(s), and it is perhaps why he indicated the order as such. However, the standard orientation for reading script in the United States (and the West) is, of course, from left to right, and thus one cannot be certain if the caption reflected Sadiq’s cultural logics or was simply a typographical error on the part of whomever composed it. As such, it is also possible that Florence is the woman standing on the left, wrapped in a large, plain white sheet, with a dark, unadorned hat.
What can be conclusively known about Florence Watts is that she, along with her peers in the photo, converted to Ahmadiyya Islam in the summer of 1922, around six months prior to the publication of the photo. Her name first appears in the July 1922 issue of the Moslem Sunrise among a list of approximately one hundred fifty names listed in the “New Converts” section of the magazine, which also includes the names of other women in the photo, “Mrs. F. Robinson (Ahmadia),” “Mrs. V.C. Clark (Ayesha),” and “Mrs. Parabee Thomas (Khairat).” This particular issue of the Sunrise was the first to be published after Sadiq moved the headquarters of his mission to the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago in May or June 1922; the previous issue had been published in April, with the organization’s address listed in Highland Park, Michigan, the further details of which I will discuss shortly. My focus on Florence here is due to the fact that, of the four women in the photo, she is the only one who has a substantive presence in the historical archive beyond the pages of the Moslem Sunrise, one that allows for the reconstruction of the basic details of her life before and after her conversion to Islam. From her appearance in the Moslem Sunrise, as well as in the 1880, 1920, and 1930 federal censuses and a 1933 death certificate,11 Florence Watts emerges as a complex and multilayered individual whose decision to claim Islam was shaped by the overlapping historical forces that impelled working-class Black women to seek work in Chicago and rendered the city an exciting, chaotic, difficult, and dangerous site of encounter from which they sought safety and community in racially and gender-specific ways, including religious conversion.
Unlike many other new migrants, Florence did not come to the city directly from the South but from Washington, DC, where she had been employed as a maid. The nation’s capital had been a logical place for Florence to initially seek employment; she had grown up forty miles outside of the District of Columbia, in the small, unincorporated town of Ellicott City in Howard County, Maryland.12 While Maryland was a slave state, its position at the border of North and South, as well its proximity to the capital city of Washington, DC, made it a critical battleground during the American Civil War. This position produced intense political polarization among the state’s citizenry, from those who unabashedly supported secession and slavery to staunch abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, who was born in nearby Talbot County, Maryland.13 Florence was born in Ellicott City in 1878, the second to youngest of the six children of John and Elizabeth Sullivan, transplants to Maryland from North Carolina and Virginia, respectively. At the time that John and Elizabeth likely arrived in Ellicott City, around 1870, shortly following the end of the Civil War, the city was “a prosperous farming and manufacturing area,” a mill town that served as base for Union troops and in which homes and churches had been used as hospitals for the Union wounded.14 Perhaps its Union-oriented politics brought John Sullivan and his family to settle there, where John found work in a local store and Elizabeth was a housewife who stayed home with their six children. In the 1920 census, Florence is listed as not having attended school, although it is highly possible that she received lessons at, or attended, the Ellicott City Colored School, built in 1880, the first school for Black children erected through public funds in Howard County, as she is able to read and write.15
Prior to her arrival in Chicago, Florence worked as a maid in Washington, DC, where she went by her maiden name, Florence Sullivan, and lived as a boarder in the home of William and Alice Jones, a Black couple. In 1900, Florence is listed in the federal census as being twenty-two-years-old, single, and without children. Because of her time spent in the District of Columbia, we know she was not, upon her arrival in Chicago in the following decades, a newcomer to city life, nor would she have been unaccustomed to the service and domestic type of work available to Black women in Chicago at the time. She also likely had familiarity with the ins and outs of how someone like her might secure housing, ride public transportation, and seek and secure employment. Still, Florence was surely surprised, impressed, or overwhelmed by what she encountered in Chicago’s “Black Metropolis,” which had emerged during the early decades of the 1900s as a burgeoning cultural, religious, and political center of Black American life. As the terminus of the Illinois Central Railroad, writes Allan Spear in his 1967 text, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, “Chicago was the most accessible northern city for Negroes in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas,” attracting more Black migrants than any other northern city.16 Indeed, while the city had long boasted a sizeable Black population, including a strong Black elite and bourgeoisie class, following the start of World War I in 1914, Black American Southerners began arriving in the city in record-breaking numbers; between 1916 and 1919, an estimated 50,000–75,000 new Black residents relocated to Chicago. In 1910, the census recorded 44,108 Blacks in the city; by 1920, the number had risen to 109,458. By midcentury, the city’s black population had reached almost half a million (comparatively, the total in New York City was 340,000; in Philadelphia, 370,000; and in Detroit, 335,000).17
In addition to its accessibility by train from the South, other factors contributed to Chicago’s popularity as a destination for migrants, in particular its reputation as a place of limitless Black opportunity, a notion that was advanced in the pages of the Chicago Defender. The paper, being widely circulated across the South, frequently trumpeted the city’s advantages and actively encouraged Southern Blacks to migrate with the promise of plentiful employment, freedom from racial violence, and general prosperity. The city’s promise was also conveyed through the pages of the Sears & Roebuck catalogues (which were also widely distributed in the South), in which the Chicago-based retailer enticed consumers with its images of stylish clothing, elegant home furnishings, and the latest appliances, such as phonographs and nickel-plated stoves. On a more personal note, Blacks across the South heard exciting tales of Chicago nightlife, culture, and money making from the tens of thousands of Black men who had found work as Pullman porters on the Illinois Central Railroad line.
This new Black population from the South fundamentally shifted Chicago’s racial dynamics. Unlike Florence Sullivan, many of those who arrived with this massive influx between 1914 and 1920 were unused to, and unfamiliar with, city life and were upset to be met with inadequate wages and substandard housing. Further, the city’s racial and economic realities produced new (and exacerbated existing) racial tensions between white and Black Chicagoans. New Black migrants resented the intense anti-Black sentiment they encountered (which they had hoped they had left behind in the South), while white Chicagoans feared and racially antagonized the Black “migrant mob.” Such tensions contributed directly to the “Red Summer” race riots of 1919, which left fifteen whites and twenty-three Blacks dead and more than five hundred injured.18 The riots occurred toward the end of an era that scholars of Black history have called the “nadir of American race relations” in the United States, with riots also occurring in two dozen other towns across the United States that summer. The “nadir” refers to the period following Reconstruction from roughly 1880 to 1920—four