Novel 'On the Rooftop' Recalls San Francisco's Fillmore District, Once Known as 'Harlem of the West'

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 1950s, San Francisco’s Fillmore district was known as the Harlem of the West. It was famous for its jazz music, its artists and its writers and it served as a cultural hot spot for San Francisco. Writer Margaret Wilkerson Sexton captures the neighborhood’s zeitgeist in her new novel “On the Rooftop,” which tells the story of a single mother and her three daughters trying to make it in music. The Fillmore that Sexton’s characters occupy is a vibrant Black community in danger of being erased by an encroaching displacement campaign. We’ll talk to Sexton about her book and what made the Fillmore “Bop City.” Guests: Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author, "On the Rooftop" - also author of "A Kind of Freedom" and "The Revisioners." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:43.1	From KQEWED in San Francisco, this is Forum.
1:02.6	I'm Mina Kim.
1:04.4	In the 1950s, San Francisco's Fillmore district was known as the Harlem of the West.
1:10.2	Margaret Wilkerson Sexton captures the neighborhood zeitgeist in her new novel On the Rooftop,
1:14.6	which tells the story of a single mother trying to help her talented daughters make it in the music business
1:20.6	when they have different visions for their lives.
1:23.6	We'll talk to Sexton about rejecting parents' dreams, about ambition and optimism, all in the face of a gentrifying Fillmore and the threat of displacement. Join it. Welcome to Forum. That's a little. Yellow Basket, I send a letter to my mommy on the way I dropped it.
2:20.8	That's Ella Fitzgerald's A Tisket, a Taskett, a song, one of the characters
2:25.1	hums throughout Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's new book on the rooftop.
2:30.2	It's a story set in San Francisco's Fillmore District in the 1950s, when jazz poured from places like the Champaign Supper Club and Bop City, even as the forces of urban renewal began to displace the neighborhood's black residents.
2:45.1	It's here where we meet Vivian, a single mother of three talented daughters who allow Vivian to dream big for what their lives could be.
2:53.4	But the girls don't exactly share their mother's vision.
2:57.6	Joining me now is writer Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.
	...

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