By Holly Van Leuven

The “Writing Black Lives Today” panel was moderated by Kevin McGruder, author of Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia University Press, 2021). The panelists were: Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, author of The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (Ferris & Ferris/University of North Carolina Press, 2023); Tanisha C. Ford, author of Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon, and the Glamour, Money and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement (Amistad, 2023); and Doug Melville, author of Invisible Generals: Rediscovering Family Legacy, and a Quest to Honor America’s First Black Generals (Atria/Black Privilege Publishing, Simon & Schuster, 2023).  

The three biographers undertook their work with different amounts of source material available to them. Myers’s efforts to uncover the life of Julia Chinn, the enslaved common-law wife of Richard Mentor Johnson (Martin Van Buren’s vice president), met several roadblocks. The most significant was that Johnson’s surviving brothers burned the papers of the former vice president and Julia after Johnson’s death (Chinn had predeceased him), possibly to keep Johnson’s relationship with an enslaved Black woman from the eyes of posterity.  

Myers began amassing a cache of letters from other peoples’ archives, such as the people Johnson wrote to, which mentioned Chinn and the life they lived at Blue Spring Farm, his plantation in Kentucky. Letters written by their neighbors, like Henry Clay, were also helpful to understand her subject’s place and time.  

Ford, on the other hand, enjoyed access to a large amount of Mollie Moon’s archival material, primarily at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. But Ford soon realized she had a complex story to tell. She explained, “My conflict was: what do you do when you’re writing against decades of a public civil rights movement narrative that lionizes figures like Martin Luther King?” While Mollie Moon, who was the founder of the fundraising arm of the National Urban League and had deep ties to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other organizations within the civil rights movement, also had family origins in the deep South and was a recognizable figure among the Black literati of her day. “She isn’t a figure that tracks with these big, archetypal figures that we’ve now accepted as [the] faces of the civil rights movement,” Ford said.  

Doug Melville’s subjects, Benjamin O. Davis Sr.—the first Black officer of the U.S. Army—and his son, Benjamin O. Davis Jr.—the commander of the WWII Tuskegee Airmen and a four-star general—were all but literally erased from history. In the case of Davis Jr., Melville said, “They removed him from the graduation directory at West Point and he doesn’t get put back in until 2015.”  

Melville was able to uncover and then write the untold story of these military heroes in part because his father, L. Scott Melville, beginning at the age of six, was raised as a son by Davis Jr.  But this didn’t mean that piecing the story together was easy. Doug Melville’s father, who is still living, often didn’t want to be interviewed. Melville said, “It was the family stories you know that the Silent Generation on the couch doesn’t really want to talk about. He didn’t really want to share the family story because it was so sensitive. It was just unbelievable how these two men had literally been systematically erased.” 

These three biographers were also confronted with the challenge of telling “intersectional” stories in deeply personal ways. Myers said, “What we don’t like are survival stories. People who do what they have to do in order to stay alive and in order to make a better way of life for their children. And that’s where Julia’s story becomes really complicated.” 

“She’s not a heroine,” continued Myers. “She doesn’t run an Underground Railroad stop on her plantation, she doesn’t run away, she doesn’t rise up and murder Richard Johnson in his sleep. She stays with him for 23 years until she dies. She predeceases him. She becomes the mistress of Blue Spring Farm, like a plantation mistress. She oversees almost 100 enslaved laborers, both domestic staff and field hands. She metes out punishments. She helps put together huge galas when presidents and generals come to visit. . . . She handles the finances. She has access to Johnson’s lines of credit. She is an incredibly powerful person on her plantation. But the book also talks about where those lines of privilege are drawn.” 

Myers also said that, when contemporary readers look back in time, “we all want to believe that we would be a Sojourner Truth. . . . But how many Sojourner Truths and Harriet Tubmans were there? And how many more women like Julia found themselves between a rock and a hard place?”  

As Myers made clear, despite the privileges Chinn enjoyed as the common-law wife of Johnson, she did not experience “a consensual relationship.” Rather, “she was compliant. . . . She’s human and she’s deeply flawed. But does that mean we shouldn’t read about her? I disagree.” 

In Ford’s case, she had to explore an aspect of the civil rights movement that she believed people are sometimes apprehensive to consider: who paid for it? She explained, “I told a colleague friend who’s a labor rights activist that I was following the money. She was like, ‘Whoa, wait. Following the money that is actually a tactic that your enemies use against you, right? So, you follow the money of the quote-unquote good guys, what are you gonna unearth?’ But this is a story that needs to be told.”  

Following the money led Ford to discover the complexity of her subject. She said: “So how do I hold both of those things in tension, the fact that this woman is a brilliant fundraiser . . . with the fact that this was all very complicated? Not only in terms of where the money was coming from and where it was going, but also in terms of the conversations that Black people were having about the white hand of philanthropy and the role that it should play in the movement.”   

Ultimately, Ford’s guiding narrative line was to write in a way “that honors what this Black woman, who we don’t really know in the ways that we should, has done but that also gives us a more complex understanding of the [civil rights] movement and how movements are funded.”  

Melville explained that even feel-good achievements in social progress aren’t always what they appear to be. Concerning the writing of his biography, he said, “It taught me so much about why opportunities happen when they happen. It’s so tied into our politics that sometimes we don’t even see it around us.” 

Examples that Melville provided included how Franklin Delano Roosevelt ultimately allowed the Tuskegee Airmen to serve in World War II and allowed Davis Sr. and Davis Jr. to lead them. But Roosevelt only did this after consulting with Davis Sr., then the highest-ranking Black person in the military, and asking him how he could win the Black vote. Davis Sr. replied, “You must show that the military is fair.”  

Melville shared this story from Davis Jr.’s life: “In 1967, he’s supposed to get his fourth star and LBJ tells him, ‘I put Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, I passed Martin Luther King’s agenda. I can make no more political allies by allowing you to be a four-star general,’ and [then he] forces him to retire in 1970. And then after 12 years, John McCain lobbies for him to get his fourth star in retirement and, in 1999, President Clinton elevates him to four stars at the White House.” Clinton, however, put two conditions on the honor: The ceremony had to happen during the same week as the Monica Lewinsky hearing and the family would not be paid the cash award that Davis Sr. would have received if he had gotten promoted in 1967. 

“All these stories have multiple layers,” Melville added.  

In conclusion, Ford said, “The biographer has the tools to try to step into the world and the mind, [and] the interiority of a subject, and to use their lives and their ways of seeing the world to help us grapple with these complexities. . . . I got to see that it’s OK to tell this story with all the layers and all the complexities and the tensions.” 

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By Holly Van Leuven

In this BIO Conference panel, Susan Blumberg-Kason, author most recently of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China (Post Hill Press, 2023), led three recently published (or soon-to-be-published) biographers of Asian and Asian American biographies in a discussion that touched on the challenges of telling authentic stories of Asian lives for a wider audience—and also about being Asian biographers in a majority-white industry.  

Katie Gee Salisbury, author of Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong (Dutton, 2024), on Hollywood’s first Asian American movie star, said, “In everyday life, most people don’t realize I’m Asian, so it’s interesting for me to, on the one hand, have privilege as someone who is white passing, but then because of the topics I write about, which are mostly Asian American stories, I sometimes feel like I’m in the ghetto because people just don’t have an innate understanding of why this history is important. Anna May Wong’s story is also American history. It’s not just an Asian story.”  

When Salisbury started pitching her proposal in early 2020, before the pandemic, she said she was met with “a lot of skepticism” among editors. She explained, “Two of them were Asian American editors. Three of them were women of color. With the two Asian American editors, the issue was the people they reported to didn’t get it and were concerned, they had a lot of questions. They wanted to know what I was going to find before I found it.”  

Sung-Yoon Lee, author of The Sister: The Extraordinary Story of Kim Yo Jong, the Most Powerful Woman in North Korea (Public Affairs, 2023), also confronted editors’ skepticism when pitching his book about the sister of Kim Jong Un, who in her own right is a prominent North Korean politician. “Many were not interested,” Lee said.  

Because of North Korea’s geopolitical isolation and culture of secrecy, Lee relied on “about 500 hours” of North Korean public video footage to build the foundation of his biography. He explained, “One reviewer of my humble book—it was probably an insult, I’m still not sure—said, ‘This is Kremlinology on steroids.’ I was able to gain some clues.” 

Karen Fang, author of the forthcoming Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong (Rutgers University Press, October 2024), found her biggest challenge to be the “transition from being an academic writer to being a narrative storyteller.” A specific question she grappled with was, “How do I talk about the process of research? Because I think as an academic . . . a lot of times we only talk about our research when we acknowledge where our gaps are. Or we assess the reliability of our sources or something like that, but I realized . . . the research becomes part of the story, it becomes a pursuit.” She described the key to her success in writing the story as “putting archives in dialogue with each other.” 

While Fang and Salisbury enjoyed the ability to work with the families of their subjects and earn their trust through some shared understandings, these relationships also brought a certain degree of expectation to their work that could be difficult to navigate. Of working with Anna May Wong’s niece, Salisbury said, “There were a couple of things that she kind of wanted to just double fact-check, which I looked into. And then there was the story about her [Wong] being carried out of the restaurant because she was so drunk. I use the word ‘sloshed.’ And she said, ‘I don’t like that word but you know, up to you what you want to do.’ And I left it in because I felt like if you have to be carried out of a restaurant, you are sloshed.”  

Fang added that Tyrus Wong’s daughters were also very particular about the words she used. She said, “I really felt to honor the agreement and understanding that we had had from the beginning that I was going to show them the entire manuscript. And my book is 140,000 words, because he lived 106 years. And so, I think it ended up being like six, multi-hour Zoom meetings,  probably like 18 to 20 hours on Zoom, even though I see them on a regular basis, going through literally page by page [with] the three of them, debating over these adjectives like ‘witty,’ ‘charming,’ ‘humorous.’” 

Lee contends with the family of his subject in quite a different way. He said, “My university-issued laptop has been repeatedly hacked. That’s par for the course for North Korea watchers, for journalists and others. Am I really fearful? Well, you know, I’m not going to visit North Korea. If my subject, Kim Yo Jong, calls me ‘traitor to the nation,’ ‘American flunky,’ [then] maybe that will sell more books. It’ll be good advertisement. But I’m a small fish in an ocean of whales, so I don’t think they would, [or] would be really worried or insulted. Maybe she’s a little, you know, content. Some guy out there wrote an entire book about her.” 

Some of the biographers shared experiences of working through conflicts that were more intrapersonal. Salisbury spoke of the efforts she expended to make sure she was using the clearest, most authentic, most accurate language she could. For example, because Wong was Cantonese, it would not make sense to use Mandarin terms, even when they were more common. She said, “It didn’t make sense to me to transform things she would have said like, oh, you know I’m wearing a ‘cheongsam’ [which] in Mandarin is a ‘qipao.’ I’m not going to call it a qipao because that’s not what Anna May Wong would have called it.”  

Even common names caused some vexation. For example, Blumberg-Kason and Salisbury dialogued about how “Beijing” has been known at different times as Peking, Peiping, and Beiping. Salisbury said, “I decided to basically use the words that she would have used because this is her story. Right? And I think everyone else can also figure it out.” 

The panelists expressed frustration that writing and publishing biographies has not diversified more and does not include more Asians and Asian Americans or produce more enthusiasm for the stories of Asian and Asian Americans. But, Salisbury said, “I got a book deal. I had one offer, and that was the offer that I needed.” 

By Elizabeth Schott

Are you grappling with finding the subject for your next book? You’ve come to the right place. This second installment of our new feature takes us across the continent to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA with Manuscripts & Archives Librarian Rebecca Fenning Marschall. 

How do you access the collection? 

Our Reading Room is currently open to researchers who would like to consult our collections Monday through Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. To schedule an appointment or for more information, please contact the library staff at: clark@humnet.ucla.edu. The Clark’s holdings are cataloged in the UCLA library catalog. And finding aids to the Clark’s archival collections are available via the Online Archive of California, here.

The best place to start with any questions is our general email address: clark@humnet.ucla.edu. Staff will be able to direct your questions to the most appropriate person from there. 

What is your favorite overlooked archive? 

The More House Archive. Several generations of Hope-Nicholson family lived in More House at 52 Tite Street in London’s Chelsea neighborhood, from 1892 until the late 1990s. The house was first purchased by Adrian Hope and Laura Troubridge Hope, and this archive contains materials produced by them, their daughter and son-in-law, their grandchildren, and other members of their extended families. The Troubridge, Hope, Gurney, and Hope-Nicholson families were very well-connected across a variety of disparate social circles and fields. And though this archive came to the Clark because of its connections to Oscar Wilde (Adrian Hope was a cousin of Constance Lloyd Wilde), it contains material related to Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic art and artists, diplomacy and the military (particularly the Crimean War), royalty and politics, the gay and lesbian avant-garde, religious figures, journalism, country life, amateur and professional theater, interior decoration and education, with items dating from the late 17th century to the late 1990s (though the bulk of the collection dates from the 1870s to 1940s). There are so many personalities, stories, and communities represented here, and it would be amazing to see more of them explored by researchers. There is a detailed finding aid to the collection here. 

Newest, shiniest archive 

The Helen Blackmer Papers (MS.2023.026). Helen Blackmer was a schoolteacher originally from New York who moved to Montana in 1890, and then retired to Los Angeles by 1935. Blackmer was not a celebrated or well-known person, but the Clark was interested in acquiring this collection because of the parallels with the Clark family’s origins in Montana and because of the ways in which it might inform our understanding of the lives of the women who married into or worked for the Clarks and came from similar backgrounds. To see the finding aid, go here.  

Which institution should we contact next? 

American Antiquarian Society, where Ashley Cataldo is the curator of manuscripts. 

Liz Schott is working on a biography of mid-century modern weaver and textile designer Dorothy Liebes.