When we tell the story of Islam and Black America, we almost always start with the same names: Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam. But that story actually begins decades earlier, and it begins with a woman most people have never heard of. Her name was Florence Watts. Born to parents who had likely been enslaved, she joined the Great Migration north to Chicago, and in 1922 she sat for what we now believe is the first known photograph of visibly Muslim Black American women in this country, thirty years before the Nation of Islam became a household name.
In this LIVE, I sit down with historian Zaheer Ali, Executive Director of the Hutchins Center for Race and Social Justice and a veteran of Columbia’s Malcolm X Project, to trace Florence’s journey from the rural South to Chicago. We dig into why Islam spoke so powerfully to Black migrants in the 1920s, how a missionary movement out of South Asia found a home among Black Americans, and what it means to recover the life of a working-class woman that history nearly erased.
You’ll learn how one photograph reopened a hidden chapter of American religious history, why converts changed their names, and how identity, faith, and self-determination collided during the Great Migration. Stick around. Florence’s story is heartbreaking, surprising, and far bigger than any single “great man” narrative you’ve been taught.
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Resources
American Muslims: A History Revealed — the six-part PBS documentary series hosted by journalist Malika Bilal. The Florence Watts story is featured in Episode 5. Watch on PBS, the PBS app, and PBS’s YouTube channel. More at americanmuslimsfilm.com.
Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam by Sylvia Chan-Malik (NYU Press) — the scholarship that first recovered Florence Watts’s life story.
The Malcolm X Project at Columbia University — the oral history and research project where Zaheer Ali did foundational work.
The Ahmadiyya movement and Mufti Muhammad Sadiq — the South Asian missionary effort, and its leading missionary, who helped introduce Islam to Black Chicago in the 1920s.
Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the Negro World newspaper — the parallel Black nationalist movement that cross-pollinated with early African American Islam.
The Moorish Science Temple of America — an early movement that framed Islam as the ancestral religion of Black Americans.
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Keywords
Florence Watts, Zainab, Zaheer Ali, Sylvia Chan-Malik, Malika Bilal, American Muslims A History Revealed, PBS documentary, Islam in Black America, African American Muslims, Ahmadiyya movement, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, Moorish Science Temple, Nation of Islam, Marcus Garvey, UNIA, Negro World, Great Migration, Bronzeville Chicago, 1920s Chicago, Black Muslim history, first Muslim woman photograph, Islamic modest dress, Black religious history, Malcolm X Project, Hutchins Center for Race and Social Justice, women’s agency, self-determination, Jim Crow, Progressive era social work, Black nationalism, hidden history, conversion and name change
