A mysterious photo propelled Sylvia Chan-Malik on a research mission to 1920s Chicago
Sylvia Chan-Malik“I call them visionaries,” Rutgers professor Sylvia Chan-Malik declared.
Chan-Malik, appearing in the PBS documentary series, American Muslims: A History Revealed, was speaking of the four Black women captured in a mysterious and compelling photograph from 1920s-era Chicago.
Taken decades before American groups like the Nation of Islam would rise to prominence, the photo shows that the women identified as Muslims, using blankets and bed linens as headscarves, and wearing church hats.
Chan-Malik, a professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies in SAS, was intrigued when she came across the photo a number of years ago. Although their faces are partially covered, the women’s strong, stoic gazes leave an indelible impression.
“We’re always looking at Muslims,” she said. “What were they seeing?
Chan-Malik ended up researching the life of one of the women, Florence Watts, discovering that she had grown up in Maryland before joining the great migration of Black Americans to Chicago. Watts converted to Islam there and worked as a maid for wealthy white people. Chan-Malik devoted a chapter to Watts in her first book, Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam.
And now, the PBS documentary has drawn from Chan-Malik’s research to make Florence Watts the focus of the final episode of the series, which can be streamed on YouTube.
Chan-Malik, who served as an academic adviser for the entire six-part series, discusses how the story sheds light on the ways in which Black Americans connected with Islam.
Q: Your exploration of the life of Florence Watts—as captured in the documentary—tells larger stories of Black people’s lives, working class women’s lives, and Muslim lives in 1920s America. How did Florence Watts get on your radar in the first place?
A: The impetus was this photograph of these four Muslim women. I’d see this image in various reference works, and I thought: ‘ok, you keep showing me this picture, but you don’t tell me who these women were.’
Q: Why did the photograph stand out? What about it did you find compelling?
A: As someone studying Islam in America in the post 9/11 moment, I was interested in images that show how Muslim women are portrayed in the media. But here was an image unlike any I had seen before. It wasn’t taken in a foreign land. It wasn’t contemporary. What struck me was the way they were presenting as Muslims by using sheets and blankets, wearing their church hats, and using very creative and what I see as unprecedented types of self-fashioning.
Q: How did you go about tracking down her story?
A: Luckily the Islamic movement through which the women converted, a South Asia based missionary movement called the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, published a newsletter called The Moslem Sunrise, with the names of all these converts. So from that I started digging. I went on genealogical sites and sought out census data. Only one of the women emerged as someone I could trace from birth to death. And that was Florence Watts.
Q: She was not a famous person or a public figure. That must have made the research challenging.
A: When you are researching non-traditional subjects, like a working-class Black woman in the 1920s, you have to use inter-disciplinary methods to get the story. I am trained as a cultural and literary studies scholar, so I had to learn to be a historian and use primary sources and archives.
I actually went to the neighborhood in Chicago where Florence Watts lived, and I walked those streets and saw how far her boarding house had been from the mosque. I put myself on the southside of Chicago in the 1920s and thought how this neighborhood would have been loud and bustling and here she is, walking with this hat and this scarf and this outfit. What would she have felt walking along these streets?
Q: What do you think drew her to Islam?
A: First and foremost, as a migrant, she’s looking for safety and community. She’s alone in the city. She was living in boarding houses and working in the homes of white people.
Florence came from Ellicott City, Maryland, a community that had one of the few Black schoolhouses. It’s conjecture, but it’s possible she learned how to read and write. And the Islamic movement she joined offered opportunities for study.
I did interviews with African American elders in the Ahmadiyya community, people in their 80s and 90s, who said ‘my mother was always in a reading group, always reading Qur’an.’ Florence might have been drawn to having that space with other women where she can read, think, and be a complete human being, not just someone’s maid.
So much of this early 20th century Islam in African American communities was a search for an identity that went beyond subjugated blackness in the U.S. You were now part of a global community of believers, you had an identity that was not a formerly enslaved person or a descendant of slaves. You were a Muslim.
Q: Your research specialty is Islam in America. What can we learn from the documentary?
A: In the post 9/11 moment, people are far more familiar with stereotypes around Muslims than they are with actual Muslims.
So, what I think the documentary does, and what this episode does, is show that Muslims are complicated people who are living their lives under extraordinary circumstances and trying to fashion new ways of seeing and engaging the world amidst the most American of circumstances, including issues of race, class, migration, citizenship, gender.
That’s the story. It’s not about, ‘look at the Muslims.’ It’s look at these regular folks who are trying to see the world in a new way and doing it through a lens that gives them agency to challenge these neat categories that we place on people in this country.