♪curious music♪ [Malika VO] Chicago: the beating heart of the Midwest.

Muslim roots run deep here, especially in Black communities.

That history is captured in this photograph.

It's the first known image of a group of visibly-Muslim Black American women, and it was taken in Chicago 100 years ago, in 1922.

♪♪♪ [Malika] How did you come across this photograph?

I started researching the history of Islam and Muslims in the United States.

I kept seeing this particular image.

And it was just kind of put there as an indicator that women were present in this history.

And I started asking, "Who were these women?"

The first thing that comes out to me is this crown -- Black church hat.

Who are these women and what does it mean for them to have, you know, this... be wrapped up like this at this time in America?

You can't tell the story of America without the story of Black people, and you can't tell the story of Muslims in America without the story of African American Muslims.

[Sylvia] I call them "visionaries."

They're seeing the world through this newfound lens of being Muslim that's unprecedented.

♪♪♪ [Malika VO] In the 1950s, a Muslim organization began to inspire Black Americans across the country.

Everybody in Harlem is a Muslim!

[Malika VO] Leaders like Malcolm X and members like Muhammad Ali soon made the Nation of Islam a household name.

I've been all over, and everybody knows and are talking about the Muslims in America!

[applause] [Malika VO] The Nation became so well known, it's easy to think the recent history of Black American Muslims starts here.

But the story goes back much further, as the photograph of the four American Muslim ladies makes clear.

It was taken 30 years before the Nation of Islam came to prominence.

[Malika] Where was this photograph taken?

[Sylvia] On the South Side of Chicago, -in 1922-- -[Malika] Where I'm from.

[Sylvia] Where you're from, right!

It was from a journal of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam called The Moslem Sunrise.

I think it's still published now, sporadically.

♪delicate pensive music♪ They would list the names of people who converted, and I looked for the names of these women.

And what I found is they all converted within a month or two of each other.

Then, I was able to look through census records.

And I looked for all of them, but only one of the women emerged continuously, from the decades before the photograph was taken into the years after the photograph was taken, and that was Florence Watts.

[Malika VO] But who was this woman?

And what can she tell us about the early history of Black American Muslim communities?

Piecing this story together begins with Florence's first appearance in the public records.

In the 1880 census, we find her as a child, living in Ellicott City, Maryland, just outside Baltimore.

She's with her parents, John and Elizabeth Sullivan, whose places and dates of birth suggest they were once enslaved.

In the 1900 census, Florence is living in Washington, DC, where she spent most of her 20s working as a cook and a maid... until she decided to move again, joining thousands of other Black Americans who were leaving their homes in search of better lives.

♪♪♪ During what historians now call "The Great Migration," you had unprecedented numbers of African Americans -- the formerly-enslaved freed men and women and their descendants -- making the journey from the rural South to the North.

[Sylvia] People imagined they could escape the horrors of the -Jim Crow South... -[Malika] Right.

[Sylvia] And find new opportunities; -they were migrants!

-[Malika] Mm-hm.

You were getting people who are adventuresome because, as bad as it is in the South, your home is there, your family, your community, and you have to go north and rebuild.

[Malika VO] Of all the northern cities people migrated to, Chicago had a special appeal.

♪jazzy music♪ It's where Florence moved to from DC, just before my own ancestors arrived on their journeys out of the South.

The thing about Chicago -- starting in the 1910s -- is it was seen as this fabulous place of opportunity!

♪♪♪ And there's a number of reasons for that -- first of all, the railway.

♪♪♪ So many trains led to Chicago.

[Edward] Chicago offered unprecedented opportunity.

They could not find enough labor.

And they didn't want to pay top dollar, either.

It was very useful to welcome immigrants and African Americans from the South, and it's at that point it creates a meeting.

[Sylvia] Chicago was a place of mythology and folklore.

Blues singers sang about it in their songs.

[Fatimah] You have the establishment of independent African American institutions, you have churches, you have salons, barbershops... [Edward] You have to imagine the kind of bustling activity and exchange -- of people speaking different languages, of different ideas coming in from all over the world, clashing with each other.

I mean, this is just this very ripe moment for cultural creativity and florescence.

And so, that's what I imagine her finding as she gets there.

[Malika VO] Florence's decision to make Chicago her home makes her story feel very personal to me, and to my sister, who still lives and works here.

[Malika, chuckling] It's on days like today that I'm really happy that our great-grandparents chose Chicago.

Gorgeous.

And they all came here in the Great Migration, which I've only recently begun to think of as a refugee story.

Mommy's parents' family... really kind of landed in Chicago, in some ways really actively fleeing the terror of the South, fleeing a potential mob.

The migration here, the choosing of Chicago, and just the search for something more for their families...

I feel like, in telling the story of Florence, I am also retelling the story of... our grandparents, our great-grandparents, -even our parents.

-[Alia] Mm-hm.

[Sylvia] So, one of the other things I also found is that when Florence is in Washington, DC, she meets a man named George Watts, and it's there that she marries George.

And so, when she goes to Chicago, she does not go alone; she goes with George as a married woman, and that's when her name changes from Florence Sullivan to Florence Watts.

♪pensive music♪ She arrives in Chicago around 1910, 1911.

In 1912, a momentous occasion occurs for her: her daughter, Aurelia Watts-- [Malika] This is her first child?

[Sylvia] Yes, this is her first and only child.

[Malika] Okay!

♪♪♪ The next time we find Florence in the records is in 1920, when Florence is living in Evanston, Illinois -- not in Chicago -- working as a domestic.

[Malika] So, I spent four years in Evanston.

[Sylvia] Mm-hm.

[Malika] It's a wealthy, predominantly-white suburb of Chicago.

What was it like when Florence was there?

[Sylvia] Well, it was an almost-entirely white suburb, save for the domestics and those who worked for wealthy white families, which is what Florence did.

She probably lived in a small room -- the servant's quarters.

We find Aurelia in the census in 1920, not with her mother in Evanston, but at a boarding school for girls.

It was a school for orphans and destitute children.

♪♪♪ Aurelia is eight years old.

[Malika] So her mother is employed, but her daughter can't be with her, -so she's sent to this school.

-[Sylvia] Right.

You see here the types of separation that these arrangements caused within Black families.

The sense of necessity that would have compelled her to make such a difficult decision, it's absolutely devastating.

[Edward] It's quite a thing in the Midwest that both immigrants and Black people are promised streets paved with gold -- easy opportunity.

That wasn't the case for either of them.

[Sylvia] For immigrants coming from outside of the United States, America is this place of promise, America has never betrayed them, America has never enslaved them.

For African American migrants from the South to the North, while they have the same hopes and dreams of immigrants, when they encounter these same types of conditions, it feels like yet another betrayal.

[Malika] Florence, so she's without her young daughter, she's without her extended family.

Where does she turn for solace?

-What do we know?

-Community!

Connection, support, friendship.

And, like so many at that time, Florence begins to look for a spiritual home.

♪uplifting piano music♪ [Fatimah] Religion plays a crucial role in the formation of an African American people.

[Edward] After the Civil War, during freedom, during the era of Jim Crow, the Black church emerges as the most popular institution of civil society.

It's not just where to go to pray or to sing, it's where you do business, it's where you meet your potential marriage partner.

It's called "a nation within a nation."

When you look at what was happening during chattel slavery, the major thing that was lost was... responsibility -- the ability to be responsible for your individual self, including your very body, your children, your marriage, your union, your community, your economy, your life.

So, when we get to these cities, of course religion is one of the ways that African Americans immediately begin to exercise their own agency.

[Edward] Most African Americans throughout the 20th century are going to remain Christian.

But the church was not the only religious institution in Black America.

And it is in this time -- in the 1920s -- that there is an enormous sort of new energy around spiritual movements, in particular for African Americans because you have this wave of new political fervor and consciousness that's emerging as well through groups like the Universal Negro Improvement Association, led by Marcus Garvey.

There was a spirit of Black Nationalism.

♪soft curious music♪ African Americans were thinking about an alternative to Christianity to integrate their spiritual and religious practice into this newfound politics of Black Liberation.

I think, for people who are drawn to Islam during this period -- people like Florence -- many of them appealed to a sense of ancestral legacy -- that Islam was a recovery of a lost history that had been disrupted through slavery.

But there's also something new.

Islam, as it is presented in this moment, it is familiar enough in the spiritual sense, but new enough to introduce a different kind of political discourse -- a discourse that challenges racism.

But why Islam and not... another religious tradition?

Well, Islam, from the 1800s on, is associated with resistance to European Colonialism and Imperialism, and not just military and physical Colonialism, but mental Colonialism.

Islam is seized by some African Americans in the 1920s to articulate their dreams... to be free, and dignified, and liberated.

And that appeals to men and women.

So you have new types of religious movements coming into the space in which working-class Black Americans -- many migrants -- are engaging.

For Florence, one of the encounters that she has is with a group called the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, a South Asia-based movement in which its leader arguably declared himself a prophet.

So, on the one hand, the Ahmadiyya were very orthodox in the sense that they brought traditional Islamic practices, and on the other hand, they were quite unorthodox because of the structure of their movement.

They're small.

But one of the reasons why they're so important is they put more resources -- time and talent -- into trying to proselytize on behalf of Islam in non-Muslim countries all over the world.

♪soft curious music♪ In the early 1920s, the Ahmadis send a missionary, Muhammad Sadiq, to the United States.

[Sylvia] He was quickly, as a missionary, looking for a new place to find a headquarters, and so he saw Chicago.

He saw it as a place where he could proselytize to African Americans where there was a spirit of political, cultural movement.

[Edward] One of the things that he says: "In Islam, there is no difference between the prince and the pauper.

There is no racism.

All pray together to the same god."

He practices what he preaches 'cause in St. Louis, he appoints a Black man, P. Nathaniel Johnson, Sheikh Ahmad Din, to be the head of an Ahmadi mission that is multiracial -- that is white, that is Black, and that is brown -- for African Americans to have a stake in this.

They're not just following a foreigner here.

No, no, it's becoming their own tradition.

In Chicago, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, he set up the Mosque Cultural Center on Wabash Avenue on the South Side in Bronzeville.

[Edward] And it's bold.

It clearly says, "[speaking Arabic]" -- "The Mosque of God."

And it has a big onion dome.

He's not trying to be subtle.

[Malika] So, how did Florence encounter the Ahmadiyya?

[Sylvia] After she's in Evanston, she moves back to Bronzeville, where she becomes a cook for a fraternity house.

That boarding house is not far from... [Malika] Wabash Avenue.

[Sylvia] Yeah, not far from Wabash Avenue, exactly.

So, perhaps Florence had kind of walked by, maybe they had handed her some literature, as people who proselytize do.

Maybe she had looked at it, put it in her purse, kept walking.

Maybe the second time, she had stopped and talked to the person giving her the literature.

And maybe the third time or the fourth time, she decided to go in.

And so we find here, in 1922, in The Moslem Sunrise, so you see here this list of new converts.

It says, "116 gentlemen and ladies have accepted Islam."

And if you move down here, you find Florence's name right here -- Mrs. Florence Watts.

"Zeineb" in parentheses.

[Sylvia] Yeah, with "Zeineb," and so she also chose a new -name.

-Interesting.

[Sylvia] Which is really beautiful, right?

To be able to choose a new identity that connects you with a new purpose; a transnational, global community.

[Malika] When I first came across the picture of Florence, I thought, "She's wearing kind of strange clothes, she might have converted into something that may not have been with full acknowledgement of what she was taking on."

And then I think, [chuckling] "Why did I think that?"

That's what people think when they see us.

[chuckles] It's like, "Ugh, who made her do that?"

[chuckles] I look at it now with a sense of awe -- that she could make this decision for herself, and she decided to buck the trend, and though there was no one else around her.

We often discount -- especially for women -- their own agency.

We do them a discredit by not allowing them... to show up just the way they are, believing that that's the way they wanted to show up.

That picture, she does not look bothered, and I think there's power in that.

[Sylvia] As a Muslim in contemporary society, what I found most fascinating about this photo was their clothing.

They're wearing what you might expect of African American women of this time, but on the other hand, they have these drapings, which I ultimately -- after looking at them a few times -- realized, "These are bed sheets!"

There was a creativity and an ingenuity and an innovation to their process.

It reminds us how much coming to Islam -- for many African Americans in the 1920s -- is not just political, and it's not just spiritual.

It's also aesthetic, and material.

I think so much of it is guided by this need for independence, this need for ownership of things that we might even take for granted today -- you know, our name, our self, our religious expression.

[Malika] So, she converts in 1922.

What did it mean for her life going forward?

[Sylvia] On Wabash Avenue, they had regular reading groups where women would read and teach each other Qur'an, they learned Arabic, they were learning about their brothers and sisters abroad in the Punjab...

So it really opened up a different space.

And that's why I find it so compelling that there's an image of four women.

They were sisters in Islam that talked to each other and congregated with each other, and learned about the faith together.

[Malika VO] Eight years after the photograph was taken, we find Florence in the census again, now reunited with her family in Bronzeville.

But Florence's new faith couldn't insulate her from the challenges of life as a Black woman in early 20th-century America.

In 1932, her daughter, Aurelia, died during an operation that went wrong.

♪somber music♪ [Sylvia] There's actually an item in the newspaper, and you can see here: "A coroner's jury exonerated Dr. Fred C. Cade, one of the wealthiest and best known physicians in the city, from responsibility in the death of Miss Aurelia Watts, 18-year-old girl who died at Dailey's hospital last Saturday."

It's this last sentence that strikes me: "The coroner's jury returned a verdict of death by manslaughter, but named no one responsible."

♪♪♪ [Malika VO] Just one year later, Florence died.

Aged about 55.

But the movement she was part of -- the attempt by Black Americans to find new meaning and purpose through Islam -- continued.

♪curious music♪ [Edward] The Nation of Islam is coming into an already vibrant and diverse Islamic scene, but after World War II, it will become, by far, the largest Muslim organization of any kind in this country.

By the time the Nation of Islam is taking root in Chicago, Florence is gone.

But the community that she was a part of, and the echoes of her presence are picked up by the work of the Nation of Islam.

Florence is part of this evolving presence of Islam in America, and certainly in Black America.

[Malika VO] On Wabash Avenue today, the mosque Florence attended has gone.

It's been replaced by a modern building, where members of the Ahmadiyya Movement still meet to pray.

[praying in Arabic] [Malika VO] Their presence is a reminder of the early flowering of Islam among Black American communities, and the inspiration Florence's life can still provide today.

[Malika] Pioneers...

I don't remember ever seeing a photograph of Muslim women from way back then.

You know, you hear those stories about the incredible men in our tradition and our community who have done so much, and you assume that there must have been women that were pioneers in their own right.

But I think to have real photo evidence of that, and the community at that time, and those individuals... Florence recognized that this would be something that would be important enough for people to look back on years later, and to reflect on years later.

I think that's just really, really powerful.

Here's to Zeineb!

[Alia] It's a good name.

♪♪♪