and oppression for the last century.8 Such differences continue to separate Ahmadi and Sunni Muslim communities in the United States and underscore the highly politicized and sectarian nature of Islam’s presence in the historical record and the existing scholarship on U.S. Muslims, as well as the transnational nature of political and theological debates within even the earliest U.S. Muslim communities. In this instance, it is my contention that the marginalization and omission of the AMI has contributed to the making of an implicitly masculinist narrative of Islam in the early twentieth century. This is not only because of its emphasis on male figures such as Marcus Garvey and Noble Drew Ali and, later, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, but also because it ignores how U.S. Muslim women—as well as men, families, and communities—from the 1920s onward lived as Muslims and practiced Islam beyond a starkly political realm. They also lived as Muslims and practiced Islam in the “private” spaces of homes, meeting rooms, and mosques—which were themselves always animated by trajectories of cultural and political power—and in forms that were dynamically influenced by local, national, and international/transnational forces and currents. To initiate a story of U.S. American Islam with the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam and the Four American Moslem Ladies calls for alternative, markedly different historical narratives, those that relay Black women’s embrace and embodiment of Muslim feelings and practices as a form of social movement making—a part of what Robin Kelley has called the “freedom dreams” of the Black radical tradition, which “generate[d] new knowledge, new theories, new questions” and produced “cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born.”9 In Ahmadiyya Islam, I argue that the Four American Moslem Ladies found solace and safety, community and kinship, and a map for freedom through which they envisioned their future selves, their fullest selves in a future world.
Finding Florence
“Late last night, I sold away and cried,” sings Bessie Smith in “Chicago Bound Blues”—“Had the blues for Chicago, I just can’t be satisfied.” Recorded and released in 1923, the song expressed the thoughts of a Southern woman whose man had migrated to Chicago, leaving “his mama standing there.” Without him, she “just can’t be satisfied” and ultimately kills herself, a death which will wind up a “big red headline [in] tomorrow Defender news,” a reference to the Chicago Defender, the nation’s largest Black newspaper at the time, which had a wide circulation across the U.S. South. As Angela Davis notes, songs like Smith’s offered a rare glimpse into “new forms of emotional pain in the postslavery era” as experienced by Black women10—in this case, the pain and longing of a woman pining for a lover who has left her to seek new opportunities in Chicago, a city known as the “Black Mecca” of the North. Owing to her own lack of mobility, she cannot follow him there and thus must deal with the isolation and despair of their separation, a result of the Great Migration. With the “blues on my brain,” Smith sings, “my tongue refused to talk / I was following my daddy but my feet refuses to walk.” Although she wants to “follow” her man, her body betrays her (a tongue 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
