Florence Mills
Florence Mills was always performing when she was a child. Her stage name when she was a child was “Baby Florence”. Florence Mills first professional appearance was when she performed in a road production company production of a play called Sons of Ham. As a result of her big success in the production, a white vaudeville company hired her by the name of Bonita and Hearn. Florence then moved to New York with her family. When Florence turned fourteen years old, she organized a traveling song and dance act with her sisters and called themselves the Mill sisters. Since then, Florence went by the name of Florence Mills as her stage name. Before the second World War started, Florence went into cabaret and was hired at the Panama Café in Chicago. Then, she organized another singing group by the name of the Panama Trio. Some members of the group were named Ada “Bricktop” Smith and Cora Green. Tony Jackson accompanied the group on the piano. “The Panama Café was shut down because of the fact that many people thought it was the “center of vices”” (www.dclibrary.org, 1)
After the café shut down, Florence returned to vaudeville and joined a traveling black show, which was called the Tennessee Ten. While she was in the group, she became romantically involved with one of the members by the name of Ulysses “Slowkid” Thompson. The two eventually got married and would stay with her until her death. Because she had so many successes in her performances, she was asked to replace Gertrude Saunders as the lead in a Broadway play called Shuffle Along. The show opened in the spring of 1921 and became a huge success. After the play was finished, a white promoter by the name of Lew Leslie hired mills to perform at the Plantation Club. This was a place, which featured many black artists.
In 1922, Leslie turned the acts into a Broadway show called The Plantation Revue. It opened in New York on Forty-Eighth Street Theater in July 22nd. Later on, a man by the name of Sir Charles B. Cochran was looking for attractions in London. So, he took the Plantation Company into the Pavilion in the spring in 1923. This event stirred quite a commotion with the whites in London. Later that year, Florence returned to New York and was asked to appear in the Greenwich Village Follies annual production. This would be the first time that a black woman was offered a part in a major white production. Then, she was offered to be in the Ziegfield Follies, but turned it down in order to stay with Leslie Lew in be in another show in an all black cast.
In 1924, Duke Ellington wrote a song Florence that was entitled “Black Beauty”. In 1926, she joined another show entitled Blackbirds that opened in Harlem, New York at the Alhambra Theater and then went to Paris. After the show traveled to Paris, it went to London at the Pavilion Theater, which had about 270 performances. “Florence Mills became so popular in London, that she decided to belong to London, as Josephine Baker belonged to Paris” (www.dclibrary.org, 1). After many performances, she became ill, so she went to Germany. In 1927, she returned to New York again. In October of that same year, she went to the hospital in order to do an operation. “The doctors doubted that she would live” (www.dclibrary.org, 1). On November 1st, 1927, she died when she was 32 and her funeral was the biggest ever in Harlem.