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.
A New Sacred Order and the Politics of Respectability
As W. E. B. DuBois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, “The Negro church of today is the social center of Negro life in the United States.”26 In many regards, Chicago was headquarters for the Black Church’s social center; indeed, even prior to the Great Migration, the city had long been known as a center of Black American religious life, specifically of Black mainline Christianity. In his study of Black Protestantism in migration-era Chicago, Wallace Best asserts that the city held out a mythic allure to its new arrivals not only as a promised land of higher-paying work, equality, and educational opportunities but also as the destination of their religious pilgrimage from South to North. Best writes that “in escaping the harsh living conditions, severe discrimination, and mob rule [of the South], the migration [to Chicago] was very much a religious sojourn. The biblical imagery of the Exodus, flight from Egypt, and crossing over the Jordan were routinely invoked by Black Southerners to characterize their own migration.”27 These new migrants would bring elements of Southern folk religion into their worship that highlighted themes of exile, sojourn deliverance, and the “moral obligation” of the Church to the community, as well as more animated forms of worship, such as shouting, physical movement, laughter, and weeping to church pews. This ruffled the feathers of many of the congregants of existing mainstream Black churches in Chicago, which generally discouraged expressive worship and viewed community outreach as unnecessary. Yet churches still needed to draw new members. Thus, while Black Church leaders may have disdained migrants as unschooled in the “respectable” bourgeois mannerisms of the North, they would begrudgingly make changes to draw them in, including the implementation of community outreach programs and incorporating entertainment and performance into worship services. Ultimately, the new Chicagoans and their approaches to worship brought about “a new sacred order,” one that altered existing class divisions in the Black community and shifted notions of Black “respectability.”
Black women intimately shaped the logics and discourses of respectability politics, both in the church and beyond. It is critical to note that, in addition to the social phenomenon that affected Florence Watts’s life as discussed here so far—the Great Migration, racial tensions in the North, the evolution of the Black Church—the early decades of the twentieth century also marked growing support across the country for women’s suffrage movements and the coming of age of the women’s movement in the Black Church, which reached its apex between 1900 and 1920. Yet these latter two events worked against each other in some ways; as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham notes, as “support for women’s rights grew in intensity and sympathy, racial prejudice became acceptable, even fashionable in America.”28 Thus Black women, especially in the context of the Church, sought to mobilize the language of women’s rights in their efforts to combat structural racism. Yet as new forms of sexuality and mobility emerged for Black women, as expressed in the blues and in other modes of expression, many Black Church women viewed such practices as sinful, reflective of low moral character that would ultimately harm Black communities and the broader Black struggle. In their fight for “equality,” female activists in the Black Church “combined both a conservative and radical impulse [that] offered women an oppositional space in which to protest vigorously social injustice … situated within the larger structural framework of America and its attendant social norms.”29 These social norms were, of course, dictated by the white gaze; as Higginbotham writes: “There could be no laxity as far as sexual conduct, cleanliness, temperance, hard work, and politeness were concerned. There could be no transgression of [white] society’s norms.”30 Such judgmental attitudes and the policing of poor black migrant women’s behavior turned away many migrant women from the church. Yet even for women who were not part of a congregation, the Black Church and the politics of respectability functioned as moral and ethical arbiters of social boundaries, barometers of what was proper and improper, “clean” and “unclean.”
Still, migrant women like Florence Watts desired community, religious or otherwise, oftentimes in ways that attempted to “re-create the intimacy of village life they left behind.”31 Beyond the church, there were few alternatives. While Chicago had an established network of African American Women’s Clubs—from 1890 to 1920, there were over one hundred fifty on record—most were affiliated with churches, and such organizations were generally not welcoming to most working-class migrant women, as they were often unable to accommodate the busy schedules of those who had to both work and manage their households, as well as, oftentimes, caring for extended family and neighbors. Finally, many of the migrant women, like Florence, had encountered difficult situations in their marital and family relationships, whether the death of a spouse, which left one a widow, or divorce or separation, or having children out of wedlock, or extreme poverty or destitution, or drug or alcohol abuse, and so on. While some churches and women’s groups were certainly welcome to all, their strong emphasis on respectability discouraged many and sent them toward other spaces of community and kinship, such as those fostered by Mufti Muhammad Sadiq and the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam. I next turn to Florence’s encounter with the AMI and the work of the group’s central missionary, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, to invite Black American migrant women
