Florence Millsthe BonfireESFP

In September 1926, Florence Mills opened in Blackbirds at the London Pavilion. She was 30, and within weeks the show was the craze of the town.

London had met her once before. In 1923 she had come over in Dover Street to Dixie, and parts of the press were openly hostile to a Black company. The evening was cut in two. An English cast played the first half. Mills and her company got the second.

Think about what that asks of a performer. You walk on after the interval, into a house that has been told you are not quite welcome, and your job is to make them glad they stayed. It is the job Bonfires are built for, and still a hard one. Three years later she was back, at the top of the bill.

She had been born Florence Winfrey in Washington, D.C., on 25 January 1896, to parents who had been born into slavery. Within one lifetime their daughter was the toast of London. Her billing called her the Queen of Happiness. She sang, she danced, she was funny, and a whole theater leaned toward her.

The crown was useful. It sold tickets and opened doors. It was also a box. A queen of happiness is not supposed to have opinions about prejudice, or to be tired, or to be ill. She had all three.

One choice had already set her apart. Offered a place in the Ziegfeld Follies, the most famous revue in America, she turned it down. She wanted to build an all-Black revue with the producer Lew Leslie, believing it would do more for her people than one turn in a white show. That choice led to Blackbirds.

She used the platform. She called her work a crusade, and said every white person pleased by her performance was a friend won for her race. Away from the stage she visited children's hospitals and gave money to people sleeping rough on the Thames Embankment. That was not the side of her the billing sold.

A company of your own cannot run without you. Every night the most talked-about show in London was waiting for her, and there was only one Florence Mills. Blackbirds passed its 250th performance in April 1927. Somewhere along the way she fell ill, and played on.

Exhausted by late summer, she went to Germany to rest, then sailed home. In October she went into hospital in New York for an operation she had put off too long. She died on 1 November 1927, at 31.

Harlem gave her the biggest funeral it had ever seen, and a story grew that blackbirds flew over the procession. Duke Ellington wrote Black Beauty for her. Fats Waller recorded Bye Bye Florence on the day she died. In England, Constant Lambert wrote his Elegiac Blues.

She never made a record, so the voice that filled the London Pavilion is gone. Her choices remain: the company over the famous stage, the serious word in public, the kindness off the bill.

She was billed as the Queen of Happiness, and she was. She simply never let the audience see what the crown weighed.