Our speaker will be Elizabeth Pepin Silva, a documentary filmmaker, photographer, writer, and former day manager of the historic Fillmore Auditorium. She grew up all around the Bay Area and earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at San Francisco State University. Elizabeth was a staff producer at KQED-TV, where most recently she was series producer of "Truly CA," featuring documentaries about the Golden State. She co-authored the book Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era with Lewis Watts. A winner of film-festival awards and five Emmys, she lives in Ventura County.
The Fillmore in the 1940s and 1950s was an eclectic, integrated, and hopping neighborhood dotted with restaurants, pool halls, theaters, and shops many minority-owned and boasting two dozen active nightclubs and music joints within its one square mile. Although it has been commemorated in songs, poems, and in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, few people today know of the rich history of the Fillmore and its musical legacy because it vanished abruptly and so thoroughly due to redevelopment in the 1960s. Through dozens of archival photographs and oral accounts from the neighborhood residents and musicians who experienced it at its height, "Harlem of the West" celebrates this unique and rediscovered chapter in jazz history and the African-American experience on the West Coast.
