On September 25, the West Adams Heritage Association’s 2010 Living History Tour will celebrate the 100th anniversary of California women’s voting rights by focusing on pioneering women who dared to venture in new directions in their lives and in a variety of professions.
Amid the elaborate headstones and monuments of the historic Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, established in 1884, costumed actors will bring to life and tell the often-riveting stories of these fascinating females from Los Angeles’ earlier times.
She’s been dead since 1914, but on Saturday, September 25, Caroline Severance will come back from the grave to describe what it was like when she was fighting for women’s right to vote, and before that, for Abolition and other social reforms. She’ll be joined by fellow Southern California Suffragettes Clara Bradley Burdette, and Dora Fellows Haynes (first Los Angeles president of the League of Women Voters).
Born to former slaves in 1895, actress Hattie McDaniel, who was the first African American to win an Oscar (for her role in Gone With the Wind), is credited with a series of other firsts: she was the first black woman to sing on American radio, the first to star on a network show (Beulah), and, in death, the first African American Academy Award winner to appear on a postage stamp.
McDaniel wished to be interred at what is now Hollywood Forever Cemetery, but it’s then-owners would not break their color line, so when she died in 1952 she was buried instead at Rosedale, the first cemetery in Los Angeles open to all creeds.
Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star, was born in the U.S., a laundryman’s daughter who succeeded in Hollywood, but the stigma of race never disappeared. Wong was not permitted to kiss any white leading male actors (which limited her film roles), nor could she marry a white man in America, yet she had significant roles in films such as Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Shanghai Express (1932) that today are cinema classics.
Georgia Ann Robinson was another Suffragette and in 1916, the first black female police officer in Los Angeles and possibly the nation.
Robinson was hired by the LAPD as a jail matron, but she became a detective. She was a leading member of the Sojourner Truth Industrial Club, and one of the founders of the NAACP’s Los Angeles chapter.
Nellie Lutcher was a jazz pianist/vocalist whose bluesy swing riffs won her fame as the “Real Gone Gal” in the late 1940s, leading to worldwide tours and singing engagements with Nat King Cole, among others. Lutcher later became the first African American female board member of the Musicians Union Local 47.
Nicknamed the “Diamond Queen,” Clara Baldwin Stocker was the heiress to “Lucky” Baldwin’s fortune. She was one of the only women to
name a street ‘Stocker Boulevard.’ for herself in Los Angeles. Stocker made millions more when she sold the acres for development as Leimert Park. The women of the nation’s press made their way into newspapers in the face of strong male opposition. Young Minnie Roswell (picture unavailable) left her Minnesota farm country home at age 15 in 1878 and made her way to Chicago, where she became the Windy City’s first “Gal Friday,” interviewing John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, William H. Vanderbilt and other financiers of the era for the Chicago Record newspaper.
The Living History Tour was first presented twenty years ago to bring the stories of early Los Angeles citizens to life and thereby tell the story of Los Angeles itself. In the intervening years WAHA has showcased more than 100 historic personages (mostly men), and this year’s 20th anniversary tour is departing from that tradition to present the women of the cemetery.
To attend the tour, visit
www.WestAdamsHeritage.org
to download the order form. Tickets are by reservation (and advance payment) only, and cost $25 until September 15, and $30 after September 15. (Children under 10 attend free.) Mail your ticket request to: WAHA Living History Tour, 2280 West 21st St., Los Angeles, CA 90018. For more information, e-mail
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or phone 323-732-4223.
My dad, Harry Theobald and I moved to 2143 w. 21st Street (in Western Heights) in 1924 from Saint Louis when I was probably about four. My mother died in childbirth with me. We stayed until about 1936. It was a fun neighborhood with all kinds of stuff going on.
There were a lot of kids. We had the Slaters across the street which of course isn’t there anymore. That’s where the freeway now cuts in. Peggy Slater had three brothers and they had this wonderful sailboat. She did a lot of sailing and she became an outstanding woman sailor and won numerous races. Even though it was unusual for women to sail then, she became one of the top women sailors on the Pacific Coast. Long Beach to Catalina and then over to Honolulu. The Slaters asked me to go along sometimes when Peggy was younger, before she started sailing herself. We’d sail over to Catalina.
minorities, like Dr. Margaret Chung, the first American-born Chinese female physician, Hattie McDaniel, 
the first African-American to win an Academy Award, and 
Bessie Bruington Burke, the first African-American school principal in L.A. Dora Fellows Haynes teaming with her husband John Randolph Haynes, created one of the oldest private foundations in the city. An early suffragist, Dora was important to women winning the vote in California. 
So too was social activist Caroline Severance who lobbied for free kindergartens, juvenile court reform, and established the first women’s club in L.A., an early catalyst for change. 
Later in the century Mayme A. Clayton, a USC librarian, single-handedly amassed one of the largest collections of black memorabilia in the world, now publicly available to students and scholars. 
I lived in a neoclassical mansion at 2218 Harvard Boulevard from the age of six months to about seven years. The street was nicknamed Sugar Hill by the people across the street because they considered this block “fancy”. I would always be up and outside real early and the far away rumbling sound of the street cars downtown and the rays of the early morning sun would always give an added special feeling to the mornings. Our house was huge. On either side of the front porch, that resembled a
