Florence Mills

Florence Mills, born Florence Winfrey on January 25, 1896, in Washington, D.C., was an American cabaret singer, dancer, and comedian who became one of the most celebrated Black entertainers of the early twentieth century. Her parents, Nellie (Simon) and John Winfrey, were formerly enslaved. She appeared on Broadway between 1921 and 1924.

Mills began performing in childhood, singing duets with her older sisters Olivia and Maude from the age of six. The three eventually formed a vaudeville act known as the Mills Sisters, performing in theaters along the Atlantic seaboard. When her sisters left the profession, Mills continued, joining Ada Smith, Cora Green, and Carolyn Williams in a group called the Panama Four. She subsequently traveled with a Black touring company called the Tennessee Ten. In 1917, while with that company, she met dancer and acrobatic comedian Ulysses "Slow Kid" Thompson (1888–1990), whom she married in 1921 and remained with until her death.

Her Broadway career began with Shuffle Along in 1921 at Daly's 63rd Street Theatre, a production widely recognized as one of the events marking the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. Mills herself credited the show with launching her career, despite her prior years in vaudeville. Following Shuffle Along, white promoter Lew Leslie hired Mills and Thompson to perform nightly at the Plantation Club, a nightclub revue featuring Mills alongside a range of Black artists, including Paul Robeson among visiting performers. In 1922, Leslie adapted the nightclub material into a Broadway production, The Plantation Revue, which opened at the Forty-Eighth Street Theatre on July 22. English theatrical impresario Charles B. Cochran subsequently brought the Plantation company to London, where they appeared at the London Pavilion in spring 1923 in a production called Dover Street to Dixie, featuring a local all-white cast in the first half and Mills starring with the all-Black Plantation cast in the second half. Mills also appeared in the Broadway revue Dixie to Broadway during her 1921–1924 Broadway period.

In 1924, Mills headlined at the Palace Theatre. She became an international star through Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1926, which played at Les Ambassadeurs in Paris, in Ostend, and at the London Pavilion in 1926. Edward, the Prince of Wales, was among her European fans and told the press he had seen Blackbirds eleven times. Mills received favorable notices in London, Paris, Ostend, Liverpool, and other European cities. She was featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair and was photographed by Bassano's studios and Edward Steichen. Her signature song was "I'm a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird," and another of her well-known songs was "I'm Cravin' for that Kind of Love."

After more than 300 performances of Blackbirds in London in 1926, Mills fell ill with tuberculosis. She died on November 1, 1927, at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York City, following an operation, at the age of 31. Mainstream and Black press publications, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Defender, and the Pittsburgh Courier, reported that she died of complications from appendicitis. The New York Times noted that more than 10,000 people visited the funeral home to pay their respects, and thousands attended her funeral, among them James Weldon Johnson, president of the NAACP, along with figures from the stage, vaudeville, and dance. Honorary pallbearers included singers Ethel Waters, Cora Green, and Lottie Gee. Mills is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.

Her widower, Ulysses Thompson, a native of Prescott, Arkansas, had subordinated his own performing career to serve as her manager, promoter, and companion. After her death he continued to perform internationally, including appearances in China and Australia, until the late 1930s. He later married Gertrude Curtis, New York's first Black woman dentist, and died in 1990 in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 101.

Duke Ellington memorialized Mills in his composition Black Beauty. Fats Waller recorded Bye Bye Florence on November 1, 1927, in Camden, New Jersey, featuring Bert Howell on vocals with organ by Waller. English composer Constant Lambert, who had seen Mills perform in Dover Street to Dixie in 1923 and again in Blackbirds in 1926–27, wrote the piano piece Elegiac Blues in tribute immediately following her death, orchestrating it the following year. The rising triplet near the beginning of the piece, at bar 8, quotes the fanfare that opened Blackbirds. The Florence Mills Theatre opened on December 8, 1930, at 3511 South Central Avenue in Los Angeles, a 740-seat venue commissioned by Sam Kramer. A residential building at 267 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem's Sugar Hill neighborhood bears her name, and Florence Mills House at 220 West 135th Street in New York City, believed to be her residence from 1910 to 1927, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976, though that designation was withdrawn in 2009. A biography by Bill Egan, Florence Mills: Harlem Jazz Queen, was published in 2004, and a children's book, Baby Flo: Florence Mills Lights Up the Stage, by Alan Schroeder, was published by Lee and Low in 2012.