leola king
clara Elizabeth chan lee
Let’s begin with her hat: large, white, wide-rimmed, feather-bedecked. The sight of a Chinese woman walking into an American courthouse in 1911 wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. She knows it; that’s the reason she amplifies her presence by pulling on that hat. She wants to be seen.
On November 8, 1911, just a month after women won suffrage, Clara Elizabeth Chan Lee enters a Bay Area courthouse and registers to vote, making her the first Asian woman in the country to do so. She was born into—and in 1911 lives still—in a world that prefers her, and those of her "kind," to be, if not gone, then invisible.
This is not a new or subtle erasure. At that very moment, as she takes up a pen, there are signs everywhere in San Francisco and greater the Bay Area that read: No Chinese Wanted.
Thirty-six years earlier, in 1875, Chinese women were banned from immigrating to the U.S. In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act blocked all Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. Thirteen years after Lee casts her vote, the 1924 Immigration Act will pass, barring all immigration from all but the thinnest slivers of Northern Europe. Not until 1965 will America begin to see people like Lee as worthy of entry, much less the vote.
For Lee this November day is a beginning. She will become an organizer and activist. She will dedicate herself to helping other immigrants and Chinese Americans. She will live a long and memorable (if not always noted or remembered) life, dying in 1993 at the age of 107.
But let’s go back to that day when she stands in that courthouse in her enormous feathered hat. You can see it, can’t you? The vision and determination that have brought her to this moment, that infuse her from the tips of her shoes up to the top of her hat, that guide her hand as she writes her name?
Once upon a time, San Francisco had its own Harlem, and this Harlem had a queen. A “fast-talking,” “show-me-what-you-can-do" woman, one-part glamour and a million parts grit.
Her name was Leola King and she got her start running a barbeque pit at 1601 Geary Street. An homage to King’s native Oklahoma, it was built out of a log cabin and featured a fifty-foot smoke pit. The menu included smoked buffalo, deer, and quail.
How popular was Oklahoma King’s? Judging from the swanky Scott Street mansion Leola King eventually bought herself, it wasn’t just popular, it was epic.
Then one day she turned up to open the restaurant and saw that Oklahoma King’s had been laid to waste. Turns out the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency was fed up with trying to get King to sell her property. The restaurant was one of countless homes and businesses bulldozed into oblivion by the “urban renewal” projects that decimated the Fillmore jazz scene and eventually drove out many members of The City’s African American community.
Leola King rallied—as phenomenal women will do. The Blue Mirror, King’s new club at 935 Fillmore Street, was small, but like its owner, it packed a mighty punch. Lena Horne, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Cab Calloway were just a few musicians that passed through King’s place. And Josephine Baker, Nat "King" Cole, Elizabeth Taylor and Sugar Ray Robinson? Oh, they were all her friends.
And then the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency came a second time.
She built another jazz palace. That was stolen too. She built another one. Gone, like the rest. The last time, King refused to go quietly; she had to be forcibly removed by the sheriff. She spent the next quarter-century fighting for just compensation. She didn’t win, but when Leola King died in 2013, she died fighting.
Lance Burton, who grew up in the Fillmore and knew King in her heyday, wrote this about her in 2015: "Mrs. King was like a big movie star to many of us, a star who brought some very bright moments to our community—maybe the most golden period of years ever to have been seen in San Francisco by black folks before or since... Mrs. King gave our people a chance to dress up and shine in a Sunday evening of glory."
anna may wong
Born in Los Angeles in 1905, Anna May Wong became the first Chinese American movie star. She and her pal Marlena Dietrich tore up the town, leaving a trail of lovers pining in their wake.
Frustrated by the stereotypical roles Hollywood was serving up, she hightailed it to Europe and China and became an international sensation. In the 1950s she starred in the first-ever television show with an Asian American lead.
Does she seem familiar? You may have seen her in the recent Netflix series Hollywood. She’s also a main attraction in Peter Ho Davies’ incredible novel The Fortunes.
I gave Caroline, my Bohemians character, Anna May’s bob, her gorgeousness, and more than a touch of her naughtiness.
anne brigman
“I wanted to go and be free.” In the early 1900s, an original Bay Area Bohemian hightailed it to the High Sierras, where she tossed aside fussy Victorian dresses in favor of britches and boots, and spent her days climbing mountains with her dog Rory, a few of her women friends, and her camera and tripod in tow.
The Bohemian’s name was Anne Brigman (1869-1950). She’s this Friday’s Phenomenal Female, part of a series I’ve started about badass women from history.
Brigman’s pictures were revolutionary: female nudes that defied the male gaze even as they celebrated women’s bodies and boldly asserted their place in the landscape.
Pronouncing her an emblem of unbridled female sexuality, Alfred Stieglitz promoted her to his circle—the first Westerner and second woman he deigned to honor in this way. When she rejected his vision, he nixed the solo exhibition he’d promised her, instead promoting a young woman named Georgia O’Keefe, whom he’d soon start photographing in poses inspired by/stolen from Brigman’s work.
She kept making art; she never stopped. Dorothea Lange adored her, as did Lange’s lifelong friend and fellow photographer Imogen Cunningham. They saw in her a new way of being women—women who made art and forged lives on their own terms.
History did not do Anne Brigman justice--of course not! By her death she’d fallen into obscurity.
Then, over a hundred years after Alfred Stieglitz lured her East with the promise of an exhibition, NYU was set to put on a major show of Anne Brigman’s work.
COVID-19 intervened.
But! You can see her photographs in the gorgeous new book ANNE BRIGMAN and learn more about her in this terrific mini- documentary:
Here's to you, Anne Brigman, photographer, poet, and patron saint of wild, big-hearted, exploring women everywhere.
ann lowe
As a dressmaker’s granddaughter, I’m fascinated by the intersection of substance and style, so it’s with utmost pleasure that I introduce you to Ann Lowe, African American couturier extraordinaire.
I bet you haven’t heard of her, but I know you’ve seen her work, seeing how she designed one of the most famous dresses in history: Jackie Kennedy’s wedding gown.
Born in Alabama in 1898, Lowe’s mother and grandmother were gifted seamstresses, but she only took up her needle when her mother died, leaving behind four ballgowns that needed finishing for the state’s first lady.
When Lowe’s husband objected to her independent ways, she grabbed her son and headed to New York City, enrolling in design school. Because the school was segregated, Lowe was required to attend classes in a room alone.
Eventually, she opened her own Lexington Avenue salon, Ann Lowe’s Gowns. “Society’s best-kept secret”—that’s what the well-heeled ladies of New York and Washington D.C. called her. By the time the Kennedys came knocking in 1953, Lowe was in constant demand for her dreamy creations.
Lowe and her team worked for months on Jackie’s dress, but with just weeks to go before the wedding, an accident destroyed all their work. Lowe kicked it into high gear, working around the clock until every last stitch had been re-stitched.
Then, when she arrived at the Kennedy’s, she was told to go around to the “colored” door. Lowe let them know either she’d go through the front entrance or the bride wouldn’t get her dress. She was ushered in without delay.
She didn’t get the credit for the gown, though, not for years. When asked who designed her wedding dress, Jackie reportedly answered “a colored woman,” not naming her at all.
Despite dressing some of the wealthiest women in the country, Lowe faced financial hardships all her life, owing much to the fact that her clients regularly bargained her down. She was on the point of penury when an anonymous party swept in and cleared her debts. No one knows for sure, but Lowe herself never doubted the person’s identity: Jackie Kennedy.
Lowe retired in 1972 and died in 1981. A collection of her dresses can be found at the Metropolitan Museum.
