LEST WE FORGET   FLORENCE MILLS

                                 (January 25, 1896 – November 1, 1927)

“The Queen of Happiness”

Born in Washington, D.C., she performed in the homes of diplomats as  “Baby Florence” at an early age.   She made her first stage appearance when she was five in Bert Williams and George Walker’s Sons of Ham, a performance about which the Washington Star noted, “Baby Florence made a big hit and was encored for her dancing.”

In 1910 she joined her two sisters, Olivia and Maude, in a musical group called The Mills Sisters, touring the country in various vaudeville troupes.

After marrying Ulysses S. (“Slow Kid”) Thompson, she left her sister act to perform with him.

SHUFFLE ALONG

          Her breakthrough occurred when Noble Sissle and EubieBlake’s Shuffle Along, lost its leading lady Gertrude Saunders in 1921. 

She delighted audiences with the song “I’m Crazy for that Kind of Love.”  The show was presented at the Sixty-Third Street Theatre, since no Broadway theatre was available.  It became so popular that there were traffic jams on Sixty-Third Street every night.

Mills became known as “Little Twinks,” for she was a petite, delicate woman, described as “birdlike and beautiful,”  Poet James Weldon Johnson

said of her, “She could be whimsical, she could be almost grotesque; but she had the good taste that never allowed her to be coarse.  She possessed a naivete that was alchemic.”.   Mills’s talents as a mime, singer, dancer and comedienne became known to the theatrical world at large and she became an international star.

In From Dixie to Broadway (1924) she shattered the tradition that black musicals should have two male comedians as the central characters. As the lead in Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds (1926) she sang a song written for her which became her trademark “I’m Just a Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird.”

When she returned to Harlem after a whirlwind European tour, she checked into a hospital for an appendectomy she had previously postponed and died several days later.  Her funeral inspired one of the largest crowds and outpourings of grief in the history of Harlem. Five thousand people were packed in Mother Zion Church, while 150,000 waited outside for the funeral procession. 

A testimony to the stature of Florence Mills can be found in Ethel Waters’ autobiography, His Eye is on the Sparrow (1951).  She had replaced Mills in Shuffle Along but she wrote, “Broadway and all downtown belonged to Florence Mills.”

Resource:  Notable Women in American Theatre. 1989

Johnson, James Weldon.  Black Manhattan. 1968