Florence Mills

• Born: January 25, 1895
• Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
• Died: November 1, 1927
• Place of death: New York, New York

Entertainer

During the 1920’s, Mills was known as the Blackbird of Harlem. An accomplished dancer and singer, she was the first African American female performer to achieve national and international superstardom. Her untimely death in 1927 inspired Duke Ellington to write his classic song “Black Beauty” in tribute to her.

Areas of achievement: Dance; Entertainment: vaudeville; Theater

Early Life

Florence Mills was born Florence Winfrey in Washington, D.C., on January 25, 1895, to Nellie and John Winfrey. She was the seventh of eight children. Her father was a day laborer, and her mother was a laundress. As a child, Mills discovered her talent for dancing through her father’s friendship with a local theater manager. Her specialty was the cakewalk, then a very popular dance with historical roots in antebellum plantation culture. Her family often struggled to make ends meet, with her mother often taking in laundry from local prostitutes. Mills began to hone her singing talents by performing for these women for small amounts of money. Her admiring audiences soon grew to include both working people and the social elite. She eventually took the stage name Mills and, along with her sisters Olivia and Maude, began her career as a child performer.

By the turn of the century, blackface minstrelsy had given way to a golden age of black musical theater. Mills and her sisters enjoyed early success in vaudeville shows in major venues in Washington, D.C., before temporarily leaving the stage because of age restrictions. In 1910, the trio resumed their careers in New York as the Mills Sisters and traveled the black vaudeville circuit along the East Coast. The group eventually disbanded and, in 1916, Mills left New York for Chicago, where she found great success on the cabaret circuit. In Chicago, she established close professional and personal friendships with Ada “Bricktop” Smith and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. In 1917, when she was member of a jazz troupe called the Tennessee Ten, she met her husband, Ulysses S. “Slow Kid” Thompson.

Life’s Work

Back in New York in 1921, Mills got her biggest break. Using the skills honed from her performances with the Ten, she and Thompson, who was now also her manager and promoter, secured for her a role in Shuffle Along, the most popular African American musical on Broadway. The show was groundbreaking in that it legitimized the commercial potential of black musicals. This opportunity provided the launching pad for Mills’s catapult to stardom.

Mills’s debut in Shuffle Along enabled her to demonstrate that black female performers could captivate audiences and critics alike. By the end of 1921, she was the show’s leading attraction. She followed this success with Plantation Revue, her first starring role in a full-scale Broadway production. Through her successes in these shows, Mills became Broadway’s first major black female star. On the heels of this accomplishment, she made her London debut on May 31, 1923, in Dover Street to Dixie. The critical and commercial success of the show enabled Mills to return to New York an international star. Her triumph in the revue also was notable in that it marked the beginning of a new appreciation for African American culture as expressed through jazz. Along with many of her fans and the black press, Mills viewed her successes as offering a positive image of African Americans during an era of pervasive racial oppression.

In October of 1924, Mills was back on Broadway performing in an extraordinarily successful production called Dixie to Broadway. The show represented the debut of her number “I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird,” which became her signature song. Both Mills and the black press promoted the song as a plea for racial tolerance and social justice. Later, during a successful tour of Paris and London with the revue Blackbirds, Mills used her celebrity to link the song to the persistence of racial prejudice. Although she already was a symbol of black accomplishment and dignity, her international artistic achievements and her willingness to use her fame to speak out against racism further endeared her to African American audiences.

During her final months on tour in Europe in mid-1927, Mills was exhausted and weak. After a brief respite in Germany, she returned home to Harlem. She died in a hospital there on November 1, 1927, of complications from tuberculosis. Her death was reported as a major news story in domestic and foreign newspapers. More than one hundred thousand mourners attended her funeral and its procession. The reaction to her death from the press and public alike was a testament to her status, not only within the African American community but also nationwide and worldwide.

Significance

Mills’s triumphs in the entertainment world on both a national and international scale led to many breakthroughs for black artists. She was the first black star to headline at the Palace Theater on Broadway and, along with composer Will Vodery, the first to be feted at an official reception by the mayor of a major American city (Philadelphia). In 1925, she became the first African American to appear in a full-page portrait in Vanity Fair. These achievements and others helped blaze a path for black female entertainers. The annual Flo-Bert Awards, which recognize achievements in tap dance, are named after Mills and vaudeville star Bert Williams.

Bibliography

Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Analyzes Mills and other influential female entertainers in terms of race, gender, and sexuality.

Egan, Bill. Florence Mills: Harlem Jazz Queen. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004. The first full-length biography of Mills, this volume provides a detailed account of her life, career, and achievements.

Moore, James Ross. “Florence Mills.” In Harlem Renaissance Lives: From the African American National Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Offers biographical information and examines Mills’s career in the context of race and culture.

Wintz, Cary D. Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2007. Establishes the historical context of the Harlem Renaissance and includes biographical essays on its major figures, including Mills. With CD of music, literary readings, interviews, and radio broadcasts.