Entry · catalog no. 5697
the Fillmore
/ /ˈfɪlmɔːr/ /FILL-more
noun · San Francisco — the Western Addition · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
The name Black San Francisco uses for its own district in the Western Addition — not the concert hall and not the city's redevelopment-era label. It names a community and an era as much as a place, and since the 1960s it carries loss inside it. In Bay Area Black speech it appears as Fillmoe, and as the Moe; those are the in-group forms, not corruptions.
“My people been in the Fillmoe since my grandmother came out from Louisiana.”
Origin & Attribution
San Francisco's Western Addition. The Black Fillmore was made by the Second Great Migration: wartime defense jobs drew Black Southerners from Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, and they moved into housing left empty by the forced removal and internment of Japanese American residents in 1942 — a fact that belongs in any honest account of the place. At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s it held roughly two dozen clubs in a square mile and was known as the Harlem of the West. Federal urban renewal demolished it: Geary was widened beginning in 1953, a second redevelopment followed in 1963, and some 800 businesses and thousands of homes came down, displacing around 4,700 Black families.
1942
Japanese American residents are forcibly removed; Black migrants moving west for defense work take the vacated housing
1950
Jimbo's Bop City opens on Post Street and runs as an after-hours room until 1965
1953
Urban renewal begins with the widening of Geary; a second redevelopment follows in 1963
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
San Francisco — the Western Addition · 1940s
Spoken by
Black San Franciscans; Bay Area rappers and their audiences
$THEFILThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring86 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
45/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1940
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts, Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era (Chronicle Books)
2006
■
"How 'Urban Renewal' Decimated the Fillmore District, and Took Jazz With It," KQED
2017
■
+ Cite a sourceRappin' 4-Tay, "Playaz Club," Don't Fight the Feelin'
1994
See also