On September 6, 1887, Florence Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the daughter of a dentist and a music teacher who recognized her talent early enough to enroll her in the New England Conservatory of Music at fourteen. She graduated with two degrees. She then returned to the South to teach, because that was what Black women with music degrees did in 1907 — the performance and composition career was not available to her.

Price moved to Chicago in 1927 following a race riot in Arkansas that made staying impossible. She kept composing: piano pieces, art songs, organ works, and eventually orchestral music — a domain that was almost entirely closed to Black composers of either sex. In 1932 she submitted her Symphony in E minor to the Wanamaker Foundation competition. It won first prize. The next year, Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed it at the 1933 World's Fair — the first symphony by a Black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra.

That achievement, extraordinary by any measure, produced no sustained career. The major conductors and orchestras that might have programmed her work did not. Her correspondence with Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony, has survived: she wrote asking him to consider her work; he did not respond. Her letters note, with remarkable restraint, that she was contending with being "a woman, and not white."

She died in 1953. For decades, her manuscripts were presumed lost. In 2009, nearly a thousand pages of her scores and correspondence were discovered in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois. The house had been her summer home.