The Legacy of Ed Lee, San Francisco's First Asian American Mayor
On Monday night, Oakland’s former mayor, Jean Quan, set her alarm for 5 a.m. PST. She and other Democratic activists planned to wake up early to make a round of calls to Alabama voters and encourage them to vote for Senate candidate Doug Jones. Instead, on Tuesday morning, Quan woke to news of the death of a friend—and a big loss for the Asian American community. Ed Lee, the first Asian American mayor of San Francisco, had died overnight.
Quan met Lee when the two were young community activists, studying at the University of California, Berkeley, and advocating for San Francisco’s poor, Asian American population in battles with landlords and employers. Both were Chinese Americans whose families ran restaurants. Both had lost their fathers at a young age. And both cared deeply about the plight of low-income workers and tenants in an increasingly expensive city.
As young activists, the two worked together to fight the gentrification of San Francisco’s Chinatown—and pressed the federal government to conduct a civil-rights investigation into the brutal of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man killed by autoworkers in Michigan. Three decades after first meeting, Quan and Lee found themselves only a short drive apart, leading two neighboring cities: Oakland and San Francisco.
