Being Muslim. Sylvia Chan-Malik
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reached their height both in the South and beyond, as Jim Crow spread and new and virulent forms of racism emerged in the North.
Through the close of the 1800s, many of Chicago’s Black elite had pushed toward integrationist and assimilationist goals. Yet the rise of anti-Black violence in the North, exemplified through the riots, led many to change their course, as the city’s Black leaders instead chose to veer toward a “self-help” approach—as opposed to a social justice one—such as building Black owned and operated community institutions, businesses, and political organizations and creating an internal power structure that stood apart from the city’s white leadership. In some ways, one might characterize the strategy of Chicago’s established Black bourgeoisie as akin to Black nationalism, yet it differed in that the goal of their efforts was not collective Black liberation or freedom but the promotion and cultivation of the Black respectability among middle- and upper-class Blacks, that is, the desire to prove that they were “as good as” whites. The logic went: If respectable Black Chicagoans could not look to whites to support their businesses and communities, they would build respectable and well-to-do businesses and communities of their own. These efforts would at once make de facto racial segregation the norm in twentieth-century Chicago through the hardening of racial boundaries within the city, as well as producing the neighborhood of Bronzeville as the nation’s most vibrant Black cultural hub outside of Harlem.
“A City within a City”
By the mid-1910s, the South Side of Chicago, once home to significant numbers of white ethnic Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, Irish, and Italians, was predominately Black. According to Spear, “Chicago’s Negro leaders built a complex of community organizations, institutions, and enterprises that made the South Side not simply an area of Negro concentration but a city within a city.”19 At the heart of the South Side was Bronzeville, which stretched between 22nd and 63rd Streets between State Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. From the mid-1910s through the 1950s, Bronzeville was the heartbeat of Black life, business, and culture in Chicago, a pulsing urban center that boasted a population of more than 300,000 residents in its seven-mile radius, which was filled with activity both night and day. The neighborhood was home to the leading Black institutions in Chicago, including Provident Hospital (the first Black hospital in country), the George Cleveland Hall Library, and the Wabash Avenue YMCA, as well as celebrities and political figures through the years such as Ida B. Wells, Louis Armstrong, Katherine Dunham, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and Gwendolyn Brooks. When the sun went down, Bronzeville was well known for its nightclubs and dance halls, which featured the top stars of the day, including blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ida Cox (who also recorded a version of “Chicago Bound Blues”), as well as Prohibition-era speakeasies, gambling dens, and prostitution houses.
Yet despite this vibrancy, Chicago’s South Side was also a harsh, isolating, and difficult place for most Southern transplants. While the lure of well-paying jobs, comfortable accommodations, and leisure and entertainment opportunities characterized the dream of Chicago for migrants prior to their arrival, the reality of what met them there was markedly different, consisting of ramshackle rowhouses, overcrowded living conditions, trash-strewn streets, and so forth. At the Illinois Central train station on Twelfth Street, it was common to see “men in worn, outmoded suits carrying battered luggage, and women clutching ragged, barefooted children, looking hopefully for a familiar face.”20 Whether or not these new arrivals had contacts or relations in the city, most somehow wound up in the South Side Black Belt, where they found “festering slums.… Two-story frame houses, devoid of paint … in drab, dingy rows, surrounded by litters of garbage and ashes.”21 While many of the Black middle- and upper-class residents, such as Wells, Carter G. Woodson (whose famed Association for the Study of Negro Life and History was established in Bronzeville), and the gospel music pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey, still kept respectable homes in the area, much of the grandeur that had marked the neighborhood had eroded by 1920, a result of a variety of factors, including race riots, increasing housing restrictions, job scarcity, and the decline of the Black Church as a community and cultural center.
In Bronzeville, Florence Sullivan would find an environment that was not only vibrant and dynamic but also fraught with danger, violence, and racial unease. Bronzeville posed specific hardships and dangers for Black women, whose job opportunities were strictly limited to domestic or service work or low-paying wage work in factories, professions in which they were constantly subjected to the sexual advances of male supervisors and in which they had to spend long hours away from their husbands and children.22 This was difficult not only because of the desire to be with their families but because they had believed the going North would provide the opportunities to do so. As Jacqueline Jones notes, most black female migrants chose to relocate not only for economic opportunities but also out of deep commitment to family kinship and racial collectivism—that is, to seek out better lives for their families and children and to construct family ties that had been broken by slavery.23 Although Black women had difficulty finding jobs outside of domestic service, Chicago generally offered a “more diversified female occupational structure” than other Northern cities and thus attracted more single women and wives seeking to work outside the home, which may have been a draw for Florence Sullivan.24 Yet even if women were able to find work, they were assigned the most difficult and undesirable positions, such as those in the meatpacking and laundry industries, and even those positions were scarce and unstable, with little to no room for advancement. In whatever jobs they could obtain, they occupied the bottom rung of a racialized and gendered labor structure in which they were constantly subjected to physical and sexual violence. Indeed, many migrant women had hoped they would be leaving behind in the South the “unique grievances” of Black women, namely “their sexual vulnerability to black and white men alike,” and they had “fled (North) for their own physical safety, and for the safety of their children.”25 Yet while they might no longer have had to deal with the sexual advances and physical violence of white slave masters, Black women now had to confront the aggressive behaviors and sexual advances of their male managers, landlords, bill collectors, neighbors, fellow boarders, and so on. They also constantly worried for the safety of their children. Compared to the small-town South, Bronzeville was full of pool halls, alcohol, nightclubs, and those who frequented them, providing “wide open”—and dangerous—spaces where young people could easily slip away from their elders’ supervision, spaces where they might disappear among the teeming “migrant mob.”
A series of dramatic events occurred in Florence Sullivan’s life from her time in Washington, DC, to her move to Chicago. In the 1920 federal census, Florence is identified as a widow but is married to a man named George Watts and is mother to a daughter, Anerilia Watts, born in Chicago in 1912. Thus a probable scenario is that Florence had married in the District of Columbia to a man who passed away prematurely, which impelled her to move to the Midwest. In Chicago, she met George Watts, a man ten years her senior, and in 1912, they welcomed baby daughter Anerilia. As a family, Florence, George, and their infant daughter did not want the excitement of pool halls and speakeasies but instead the comfort and stability of a well-paying job and a home. By 1920, Florence was working as a live-in cook in the home of Earnest and Carrie Rickitt, a well-to-do couple with four children living in the wealthy white suburb of Evanston located on Chicago’s North Shore, a position that kept her away from the harshness of the South Side but also isolated her from other Black people and likely kept her away from her husband and child. It is not clear where George and Anerilia lived while Florence lived with the Rickitts. Perhaps because she grew tired of this separation, the Watts family moved to Bronzeville sometime in 1921–1922, where they were boarders in the home of a Black couple named Pellon and Marie Robinson, whose home was located at 3812 South Prairie Avenue, near the heart of Bronzeville and approximately seven blocks from the subsequent site of the Ahmadiyya mosque. On the South Side, Florence found work as a cook in a fraternity house, and George worked as a laborer. Finally living together as a family, Florence, George, and Anerilia set out to make a life together, to navigate and find community and safety in the bustle of Bronzeville. Yet this posed its own challenges, requiring the couple to find care for Anerilia when they were working and to grow accustomed to living as a family of boarders, likely all three of them in one room, and having to share amenities with the Robinsons. One can imagine that privacy or solace were in short supply, conditions that impelled Florence to seek out spaces of succor beyond her work and home.
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