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“Four American Moslem Ladies”

Early U.S. Muslim Women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, 1920–1923

There is a photo. Because there is a photo, this photo, the story of U.S. Muslim women in the twentieth-century might begin with these women—four African American women in unadorned dresses, blouses, and skirts. Against a dark cloth backdrop, they face the camera wrapped in shawls and blankets fastened (with straight pins, or perhaps clothespins?) to conceal their shoulders, necks, mouths. The wraps appear to be large scarves, or maybe even bedsheets, although one woman is wrapped in a heavy woolen fabric with a carpet-like texture. Three wear church hats, the one who does not has wrapped her shawl around her head and pinned it above her mouth, exposing only her eyes and nose. The women are formal, stiff, and unsmiling, in a style typical of Victorian-era studio portraiture of the late nineteenth-century, although it is 1922. The photo’s setting is simple: There are no ornaments, no frills; wherever the studio, it is modest and spare. Before the black drape, two women stand and the other two sit, one on a carved wooden stool a bit too tall, her feet dangling slightly off the ground, her right hand grasping an armrest. They appear middle-aged, ranging anywhere from their late twenties to their forties. Their eyes gaze in different directions; two of the women look directly at the camera, the two others stare off into the distance.

Figure 1.1. “Four American Moslem Ladies,” from the Moslem Sunrise, January 1923. Image reproduction courtesy of the New York Public Library.

This is the first-known group photo of visibly identifiable Muslim women in the United States. It was originally published in the January 1923 edition of the Moslem Sunrise, the newsletter of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam (AMI) in the United States, a South Asia–based Islamic missionary movement that was one of the first major Muslim organizations in the United States. On the pages following the photo, there is a “Brief Report of the Work in America,” a recurring feature in the newsletter penned by the AMI’s chief missionary, a man hailing from the Punjab region of India (now Pakistan) named Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, who led the organization’s efforts in the United States from 1921 to 1923 and established the group’s headquarters in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, where the photo was taken. In his report, Sadiq offers descriptions of his recent lectures on Islam and his other proselytization efforts,1 but he includes no accompanying story or reference to the photo of the four women, making no mention of who they are and why the photo is included with this report, except for this short caption:

FOUR AMERICAN MOSLEM LADIES. Right to left: Mrs. Thomas (Sister Khairat), Mrs. Watts (Sister Zeineb), Mrs. Robinson (Sister Ahmadia), Mrs. Clark (Sister Ayesha)2

Such inclusion of the image alongside the omission of any information about the women themselves has also marked the photo’s contemporary afterlife in the scholarship on Islam in the United States. In this corpus, the photo is generally contextualized through narratives of Black masculinity and nationalism, deployed to demonstrate the presence of Black women in Islamic movements such as the Moorish Science Temple, the AMI, and the Nation of Islam in relation to ideologies of Black nationalism and Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanist movement.3 Its placement within such narratives implicitly advances the notion that these Black American Ahmadi Muslim women “saw” Islam and the adoption of Islamic identities in the same ways that many Black American Muslim men did, for example, as intertwined with ideologies of racial separatism, Black uplift, and revolutionary political struggle.

While Islam’s political significance—in particular, the understanding that it was a religious tradition that could foster African nationalism and develop Black racial pride and African civilization—certainly appealed to some Black women who joined early twentieth-century Islamic organizations, such politics were oftentimes not, this chapter suggests, the central or driving reasons that Black migrant women—and in particular, the Four American Moslem Ladies—chose to convert to Islam and adopt Muslim identities and practices in the rapidly industrializing, post–Great Migration North. Between 1921 and 1923, more than one thousand U.S. Americans converted to Islam through the AMI; anywhere from one-third to one-half of these new Muslims were women, and the vast majority of these women were Black. In what follows, I argue that, beyond the discourses and logics of Black nationalism, another set of at once deeply personal and unwaveringly political concerns animated Black American women’s claiming of Ahmadiyya Islam during early decades of the twentieth century. These concerns were rooted in the desire for the safety and stability of themselves and their families and emerged in response to the particular struggles of newly arrived Black migrant women to Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. Thus, although Black freedom—as expressed through Marcus Garvey’s political oratories and the work of his United Negro Improvement Association or in calls for Pan-African solidarity and African liberation—may well have been on Black migrant women’s minds, they also grappled with constant, pressing concerns in their daily lives. Those concerns included such matters as the sexual advances of their work supervisors or landlords, the dangers and stresses of raising children while working long hours, the lack of economic resources and supportive kinship networks, and the securing and maintenance of marital and familial relations in urban environments that were vastly different from what many newly arrived Black women—some former slaves or the children of slaves—had experienced in the South. In the face of such difficulties, “Islam” offered those such as the Four American Moslem Ladies a religious and political ethos that rejected the dehumanization of Black working-class women by white society and the Black bourgeoisie and presented expansive and productive conceptions of citizenship, belonging, and racial and gendered selfhood in a religious framework that was at once politically empowering and adaptable to their existing knowledge of Christianity. Further, the clear organizational structure of the AMI, along with its emphasis on religious education and moral development, constituted a stabilizing force in many women’s lives—a framework that provided safety and sustained them against the harsh and unforgiving environments of Bronzeville and beyond.

This chapter unearths the lives and experiences of the Four American Moslem Ladies. It particularly focuses on one of the women, Florence Watts—Sister Zeineb following her conversion—and explores how and why she and her peers came to claim Islam through the teachings of Mufti Muhammad Sadiq and the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam in 1920s Chicago. While Muslim women were undoubtedly present in the United States prior to 1922 when the photo was taken,4 this image stands as the earliest archival trace of U.S. Muslim’s women’s communal lives and thus, I argue, constitutes a critical, albeit arbitrary, start to a verifiable account of Muslim women’s narratives in the United States. In my investigation, I outline the historical conditions that produced ways of being Muslim for the Four American Moslem ladies as at once grounded in the Black experience of the post–Great Migration urban North and facilitated through international networks of diasporic exchange between the United States and South Asia, specifically interracial interactions between Blacks and South Asians in the United States. Through Ahmadiyya Islam, Black women in 1920s Chicago found “safe harbors”—spaces of kinship-shared spiritual desires and of respite from racial and gendered harm—in which they could protect and nurture their bodies, minds, and souls and cultivate religious and intellectual affinities with Muslim women worldwide while using Islam’s teachings to navigate and find solace from urban life. Building upon existing histories that have heretofore contextualized the lives of Black Muslims in the early twentieth century through the lens of Black nationalism and Pan-Africanist thought,5 this chapter considers how the accounting of categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality critically shift Islam’s historical meanings in the United States, with particular regard to how Black women were central to the making of Islamic practices and community formation, such as cultivating Islamic religious traditions and institutions and utilizing and engaging “Islam” in ways that specifically addressed their struggles as Black women. Above all, this chapter highlights how the construction of Black American Muslim women’s identities during the early twentieth century was deeply informed by the politics of the body, particularly the raced, gendered, and classed bodies of Black migrant women responding to—and oftentimes, insurgently against—their circumscription through the discourses and logics of race, gender, sexuality, and class of the time. In their bodies—indeed, because of their bodies—Black women like the Four American Moslem Ladies chose and claimed Islam, not only because they believed in its teachings and tenets, but also because they felt protected and guided by its presence as they enacted forms of affective insurgency that rejected their constant abjection as working-class Black women. For them, Muslim-ness was fashioned in—and would come to mediate—the contact zone between their bodies and the cultural and political terrains they inhabited in Bronzeville, Chicago, the nation, and the world.

To tell the stories of the Four American Moslem Ladies, this chapter enacts a visual reversal of their image. Instead of seeing them as part of an existing narrative (e.g., of Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Black men and masculinity, etc.), I instead consider what they saw in Islam as Black American women from the South arriving in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s and how their visions were transformed into insurgent modes of feeling and practice through which they made their Muslim-ness. To put it another way, this chapter offers Sisters Khairat, Zeineb, Ayesha, and Ahmadia as visionaries: women who came to look at, inhabit, and experience the world as Black American Muslim women during a time when there was no such thing. To see the world as Muslim women required their continual vigilance and labor, not only in terms of Islamic practices, like praying or fasting, but also in navigating how they as Black women could enact and embody Islamic practices in the racialized and gendered environments in which they lived. To explore their visions, I begin with the story of Florence Watts, a Black working-class migrant woman who moved to Chicago around 1910 and converted to Ahmadiyya Islam in 1922. Through Sister Zeineb’s experiences, I investigate the living conditions of working-class Black women migrants in Bronzeville, the neighborhood’s shifting religious landscape, the rising status of Chicago as a “global” city and of the United States as empire, and the new forms of emotionality, kinship, sexuality, and mobility that emerged in Black centers of the urban North—all factors that shaped Black women’s encounters with and impressions of Islam. I then turn my focus to Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq and his encounters with women in Chicago like Sister Zeineb, exploring how and why his teachings of Islam specifically appealed to Black migrant women. Finally, I close with a historical reconstruction of a typical day in the lives of Sister Zeineb and her peers in Bronzeville following their conversion to Ahmadiyya Islam and imagine how their newfound religious identities shifted their interactions with their neighborhood, the nation, and the world as Black American women.

Before moving on, I find it critical to acknowledge a central factor behind the scholarly inattention to the lives of the Four American Moslem Ladies and, more broadly, to the role of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam in the histories of Islam in the United States.6 Such elisions stem from the idea that Ahmadiyya Muslims are not “real” Muslims but, even worse, kafirs (or infidels) who purposefully distort the teachings of Islam, an idea generally held by Sunni Muslims, who constitute the largest sect of Muslims both in the United States and worldwide.7 Yet perceptions of Ahmadis as non-Muslims are not only theological but also political, relating directly to the status of the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan, where the group has been the subject of the nation’s blasphemy laws, which have led to their ongoing persecution 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 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 decades in which anti-Black violence, lynchings, segregation, and legal racial discrimination 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.

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 into the AMI’s fold.

But before I move on to Sadiq and Florence Watts’s meeting, however, it is important to pause briefly and ask, How might Black women in Bronzeville—and Americans more broadly—have thought about Islam and Muslims at the time? What impressions could they have had of Islam prior to their eventual conversions, of the regions and peoples of the “Moslem” world? To respond to these questions, one might consider Chicago’s emergence as a global city beginning in the late nineteenth century, a time in which the nation itself transitioned from a modus operandi of nation building to one of empire building. Chicago’s international character was exemplified through the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.32 At the same time as the exposition, the city also hosted the World’s Parliament of Religions, the first interfaith global dialogue that included representatives of both “Western” and “Eastern” faiths, which, while overwhelmed with white European and Christian representatives, also included representatives of Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Islam.33 The “worldliness” of Chicago arose in conjunction with how the “East” came to figure more broadly in capitalist consumption in the United States, akin to what John Tchen has called “patrician orientalism” in relation to the ways Chinese culture was consumed by wealthy Americans in the eighteenth century.34 Islamic and Middle Eastern objects and culture served a similar function; to own or engage with them was a way to express and wealth and status for white Americans.

This consumption of the “East,” and specifically of “Moslem” culture, as an exotic commodity coincided with a rise in the notion of Islam as a religious and cultural threat, an idea that came from the efforts of Christian missionaries. By the first decade of the twentieth century, there were numerous efforts by American Protestant organizations to evangelize the Muslim world, fueled by notions that Islam “was a flawed religion that could not save its adherents” and that “the Moslem world was in deep cultural crisis requiring a winsome Christian witness, lest a great moment of opportunity be lost.”35 Further, in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, toward the end of what Mark Twain called the “Gilded Age”—the age when every American “was a potential Andrew Carnegie”—millions of immigrants poured into the country. While most were from Europe, small but significant amounts of Muslims also arrived, mostly from Syria, Lebanon, and the Indian subcontinent. They entered a nation marked not only by its desire for empire, but one of epic inequality, where suddenly rich Americans ostentatiously flaunted their newfound wealth, while countless immigrants and Black Americans lived in squalor. Finally, in the early twentieth century, anti-Asian xenophobia was at an all-time high, as East and South Asian Muslim immigrants who did not phenotypically look “white” experienced intense racism in the forms of violence and hostility, as well as juridical disenfranchisement through immigration and citizenship laws that were constantly changed to prevent their inclusion.36

Yet, as already mentioned, Black Americans themselves were perhaps the strongest force in changing the meaning and presence of “Islam” in the United States, as the religion was praised by thinkers like Marcus Garvey and Edward Wilmot Blyden as a suitable theology for Black empowerment.37 The spirit of Black nationalism animated and amplified the message of Islam for many Black Americans, including those who joined the Moorish Science Temple—the organization founded in 1914 by Timothy Drew, who would later change his name to Noble Drew Ali—and, later, the Nation of Islam.38 Through Noble Drew Ali, Marcus Garvey, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, “Islam” emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century within the discursive lexicon of Black nationalism and liberation. At the same time, as the nation transitioned to empire at the turn of the century, “Islam” existed concurrently as an exotic oddity, an orientalized marker of a mysterious Middle East inhabited by “Moslems” and an ostensible religious threat to Christianity, reflected in the work of Protestant missionaries. As such, the early twentieth century marked the moment in which “Islam” came represent a number of at times opposed—yet always mutually constituted and imbricated—understandings of its meaning in the United States, of a far away, exotic religion and culture associated with the Middle East; a religious threat; a language and logic of Black freedom; and, later, to white Americans, an insurgent Black threat. For Black working-class women like Florence Watts and others, “Islam” was a term they had heard in political discussions of the day in relation to Black nationalism and Pan Africanism, but it was also one linked to notions of refinement or status, as it signaled a world beyond Bronzeville—a world that offered new imaginative geographies and spiritual horizons in which they could find safe harbor and construct expansive identities beyond the U.S. nation-state, beyond the racist terrains that circumscribed their bodies and minds in the post-Reconstruction United States.

“Pastor, Prophet, Proselytizer”

In 1922, Florence Watts lived just blocks away from the AMI mosque, and before eventually going in, she may have walked by on occasion or wondered about the men and women in “exotic” and “Eastern” dress she saw in her neighborhood from time to time. However, the place where many Black women in Bronzeville likely first “saw” Ahmadiyya Islam and learned of its teachings was on the “Woman’s Page” of the Chicago Defender. On August 19, 1922, between the monthly column “News of the Music World” and an advice column titled “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” by a writer calling herself Princess Mysteria, the paper ran a feature story on this page titled “Those Who’re Missionaries to Christians,” accompanied by the subhead, “Prophet Sadiq Brings Allah’s Message into Chicago and Makes Proselytes.” The piece detailed the scene of one of Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq’s lectures for “a score of worshippers … gathered in the newly-domed ‘mosque’ of the Ahmadia Moslem mission at 4448 Wabash Avenue,” a location at the heart of Bronzeville. Elaborating on Sadiq’s appearance, reporter Roger Didier offered a description reflective of the orientalist and racial logics of the time:

Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, pastor, prophet, and proselytizer, calmly discoursed on the evident inconsistencies of the Christian faith. Dr. Sadiq looks the part, having the appearance of a brown-skinned Jew, cast in a slender mold with sideburns that grow into a flowing beard of gospel likeness. His brow is narrow, but high; the eyes, brown, clear, and alert; the nose, large and domineering, as with Jews of the older type, and a white moustache covers the ample lips, which are a long way from the top of the head and sit securely on what suggests itself is a square and model chin.39

Didier then went on to describe Sadiq’s wardrobe (“a green baize full-length jacket with scarlet red lining,” “a skull cap with symbolic markings,” and “slippers”) and offered a careful inventory of the audience in the room, which included “a huge, brown individual” with “a ferocious scowl,” “a dental student from Calcutta,” a “fair-skinned Russian [with] sandy or reddish hair,” “the very dark Mr. Augustus who used to belong to St. Mark’s Church in this city,” and “half a dozen Garveyites,” including “one pretty yellow girl and another not so pretty.”40

Figure 1.2. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq. Photograph from the Moslem Sunrise, January 1923. Image reproduction courtesy of New York Public Library.

Figure 1.3. Al-Sadiq Mosque in Chicago. Photograph from the Moslem Sunrise, January 1923. Image reproduction courtesy of New York Public Library.

Following the careful visual descriptors, the reporter finally turned to the content of Sadiq’s lecture, which the missionary delivered while “planted rather leisurely against the wall” and “his small fine hands had just ceased fingering a handsomely bound copy of the Koran.” The article is worth quoting at length:

There is but one God, said he. All the others are mere prophets, including Jesus. Mahomet [sic] was the last and the equal of the others. None is to be worshipped, not even Jesus or Mahomet. Only God, the one God, must be served. The Trinity is an illusion—the word is not found in the Christian Bible and its principle cannot be sustained. God created all races, all colors. The Mohammedan faith makes no difference between race or class. One of Mahomet’s trusted followers, the chief muezzin, was an Abyssinian brought from slavery to the royal household. The sultan had no special seat in the mosque. All worshippers are equal in the sight of God. The Koran is the unadorned word of God, the Bible is much the word of man. Mohammedanism is practical, Christianity is not.41

Through Didier’s article, one sees the appeal of Sadiq’s message to the multiracial, but mostly Black, audience in attendance at the mosque that day. As Moustafa Bayoumi has written of the early Ahmadiyya mission, Sadiq’s words conveyed a universalist message that was carefully attuned to U.S. racial logics of the time. Through his exhortations of Islam’s egalitarianism—for example, Islam did not make differences between race and class, and the mention of Islam’s first muezzin, Bilal, who was Black—Sadiq opened “a critical space for race in the realm of the sacred” that enabled Black Americans to “metaphorically travel beyond the confines of national identities [to] become ‘Asiatics’ and remain Black … to be proud of their African heritage and feel a sense of belonging to the participation with Asia.”42 In other words, Sadiq conveyed Islam as a belief system that offered an expansive network of kinship and connection both in the physical and spiritual world, specifically in the direct relationship between the individual and God that would not require Black Americans to forsake the feeling of race pride or anger at white supremacy.

Yet as Bayoumi points out, a strong orientalist logic shaped the appeal of Islam to Black, as well as other, Americans in the 1920s; Sadiq’s “slippers” and his “small fine hands” are exotic and attractive signifiers of a faraway “East” that stand in strong contrast to the reporter’s descriptions of the “ferocious scowl” and “the very dark” skin of Black audience members. As such, the Defender article highlights a critical factor in understanding Islam’s appeal to Black Americans, and particularly to Black women: that the allure and promise of Ahmadiyya Islam was largely premised upon the complex relationships forged between Sadiq and other Ahmadi missionaries and the movement’s followers. In the case of Florence Watts and the rest of the Four American Moslem Ladies, the relationships were between a South Asian man and Black migrant women. To the latter, it was significant that Sadiq was neither Black nor White—and thus not a bearer or embodiment of white supremacy—and conjured impressions, as Didier’s article states, of “a brown-skinned Jew.” This description simultaneously allied the missionary to the faraway geography of the Middle East and a non-Christian religion, while positioning Sadiq and his “brown skin” as an intermediary presence within the color-conscious, black-white racial hierarchies of the United States at the time. Combined with his egalitarian message and his exotic aura, Sadiq’s racial intermediary status was critical to spurring interest and shaping the appeal of his teachings to women like Florence and her peers.

For two months following the publication of the article, throughout August and September 1922, the AMI’s meetings were advertised in the “Churches” section of the Defender’s Woman’s Page, with this brief listing:

Ahmadia Moslem mosque, 4446 Wabash avenue—Sunday evening meeting, 8 p.m. Sermon by M. M. Sadiq of India. All welcome.

Owing to its placement on the “Woman’s Page,” Black women—not men—would be the first to learn of the AMI’s meetings and thus, convey information about them to their husbands, families, friends, neighbors, and so on. Why the original story on Sadiq, as well as the subsequent listings, were published on the “Woman’s Page” of the Defender is unclear; it is likely that since much of the paper’s reporting on religion and church life ran in the women’s section, it was a natural fit to run to piece on the AMI there as well. While there is no way to substantiate that Florence Watts or any of the other Four American Moslem Ladies learned of the AMI through the Defender, the timing of the publication of their photograph in January 1923 coincides with their attendance of a meeting in the months following the Defender items, connoting that they either saw the ad in the paper and attended a meeting or heard about the meeting from others who saw the advertisements on the “Woman’s Page.”

The ads most certainly ran at the behest of Sadiq, who carefully cultivated the AMI’s publicity efforts and managed every aspect of its outreach and communications. From all accounts, it is apparent that Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq was a quick, and extremely insightful, study—a highly educated, articulate man who recognized and mobilized the political and social landscape around him to advance his work as the first Ahmadiyya missionary in the United States. Sadiq arrived in America on February 15, 1920, landing in the port of Philadelphia on the ship SS Haverford from London. Upon arrival, Sadiq was immediately detained by U.S. immigration officials under suspicion of polygamy, owing to the assumptions of the immigration officials that any and all “Moslems” were engaged in polygamous practices. When in prison, the missionary noted the very real affects of racism, in particular, anti-Black racism, in his newfound place of work—an understanding that would indelibly shape his proselytization efforts and the racial composition of those he believed would be most amenable to his message.43

Sadiq came to record many of his understandings and observations about race in the United States in the Moslem Sunrise, the bimonthly publication Sadiq began after setting up the AMI’s headquarters in Highland Park, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit) in 1921. In Highland Park, he connected with a small community of Lebanese and Syrian Muslims, publishing his newsletter in the living room of Muhammad Karoub, a Lebanese businessman who established the first mosque in the Detroit Area.44 While their denominations differed—Karoub and his community were Sunni Muslims—Sadiq was welcomed into the small immigrant Detroit Muslim community, where they bonded over the shared nature of their Islamic identities. Yet Sadiq felt many of the Muslims he encountered in the United States had lost sight of the true meaning of their faith, which he addressed in the October 1921 issue in the essay “My Advice to the Muhammedans in America.” In it, he addressed the “many Muhammadans in this country who come from Syria, Palestine, Albania, Serbia, Bosnia, Turkey, Kurdistan, and India,” which he estimated numbered “in thousands.” He observed that for many of these immigrant Muslims, Islam was “not playing practical part in your everyday life [sic]” and lamented that they were forgetting their daily prayers, forgoing the study of Arabic, marrying non-Muslim women, and not passing on their religion to their children. He especially disdained the practice of adopting “American” names: “Retain your Moslem names—Muhammad, Ahmad, Ali, and so forth, and don’t become Sams, Georges, James, Mikes, etc.”

In addition, despite his mutual respect and cooperation with Karoub and the Highland Park Sunni Muslim community, Sadiq was constantly trying to convince others of the superiority of Ahmadiyya Islam. In the United States, Sadiq realized he could find a far more receptive audience to Ahmadiyya than in his homeland; most in America knew nothing or little about Islam, of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, of the political and cultural debates that fueled varying interpretations of Islam. In particular, Americans were unaware that in Sadiq’s native South Asia, the orthodox Sunni Muslim establishment viewed the Ahmadiyya as a heretical movement. While Ahmadiyya religious practices were largely identical to those of orthodox Sunni Islam in basic ceremonial duties, such as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, Ahmadis diverged from the majority of Sunni Muslims in regard to the notion of Prophecy and their interpretation of Jesus, according the teachings of their movement’s founder, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.45 Thus, perhaps because of doctrinal differences, or simply because his mission outgrew the space of Karoub’s living room, in early 1922 Sadiq set his sites on Chicago, purchasing the property on South Wabash with the strong awareness that the movement’s message would resonate forcefully with the neighborhood’s Black American inhabitants.

Sadiq’s Chicago mosque opened to the public in June 1922, and in July the missionary published the first issue of the Moslem Sunrise from his new headquarters. Of the move, he wrote in his monthly “Brief Report of the Work in America,”