The 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music was awarded to Rhiannon Giddens’ and Michael Abels’ opera Omar, which is based on the 1831 book A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar ibn Said. Said was a Muslim who was captured in his native West Africa and sold into slavery in America, where he wrote his autobiography and other works in Arabic.
His is just one of many remarkable yet little-known stories of Muslims whose lives were intertwined with American history throughout its course. The PBS Digital Studios series American Muslims: A History Revealed tells the stories of some of those people, including Mamadou Yarrow, another West African Muslim who was enslaved before gaining his own freedom. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a portrait of him.
Or there’s Florence Watts, a woman who converted to Islam in Chicago and became a part of an early mosque in Bronzeville in the early twentieth century. She is the focus of the episode “How Islam Influenced Black Americans in 1920s Chicago,” which is the subject of a screening hosted by WTTW on Wednesday, September 17 at 5:00 pm at Impact House, 200 W. Madison St…