Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: London Breed. Read earlier dispatches here.
It was when “Get Me Bodied” by Beyoncé — the extended mix — came on that London Breed truly let her hair down, so to speak.
Inside Harrington’s Bar and Grill on Friday night, surrounded by flashing cameras and fans angling for selfies, the mayor of San Francisco was in the middle of a scrum and beaming a smile. Diehard supporters and more recent converts alike approached to pose for photos as Breed’s staff tried to manage the crowds and dutifully snapped pictures. Breed smiled, grabbed at outstretched hands, waved at those in the back, and generally took it all in.
When the Beyoncé started, she did a little jig. “Mission one, I’mma put this on, when he see me in the dress I’mma get me some, hey,” she started lip-synching, twirling her hands and weaving her head. “Mission two gotta make that call, tell him, ‘Get the bottles poppin’ when they play my song,’ hey.”
Breed is turning 50 on Sunday, and she was celebrating with a few hundred close friends and complete strangers, who had to donate at least $50 to her re-election campaign to secure entry to the party. If they had already hit the $500 donation cap for the year, they had to promise to bring friends.
“Tonight, we have raised $15,000!” shouted Lateefah Simon, the BART board member who is running for Congress in Oakland and served as the emcee for the night. Simon kicked off the program an hour after the party started, when Breed arrived at 6 p.m. The bar was already well and truly packed.
“Every yard sign costs $5,” Simon told the crowd, reminding them that Breed is in a bare-knuckle race for re-election. “Every window sign costs $6 … We need to make sure that London Breed has a world-class campaign to get her through the finish line.”
Breed, wearing a festive blue-and-white tie-dyed pantsuit with splashes of pink and yellow, was in her element, fresh off a fortunate week. A San Francisco Chronicle poll found she has gained 10 points in first-place votes since the paper last sampled residents in February; she is now the top choice of 28 percent of voters, more than any other candidate.
Breed entered the bar with a trademark smile, accepted a bouquet of yellow and red Gerbera daisies, and stood for dozens of photos while making small talk. She danced and whooped when drag queen Ms. Ruby Red Munro paraded through the crowd to “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” and a “Respect” homage. When Ruby Red’s red sequin dress suffered a 10-second wardrobe malfunction, the mayor made sure to ad lib a Nipplegate reference.
“Let me just say to Ruby Red … thank you for lifting our spirits, and thank you for just being the fabulous person you are, and thank you for showing people what Janet Jackson looks like in person,” she said.
(Ruby Red, interestingly, was one of three drag queens who accompanied Breed’s campaign opponent Mark Farrell on his Pride float in July. At the time, she said she was “still contemplating” her choice for mayor: “So far, love the guy, lovely family … His policies? We’ll learn about them.” It was unclear where Ruby Red stood Friday except, physically, next to Breed, hugging her and leading a champagne toast.)
Breed’s birthday speech, made after the drag show ended, was brief: She thanked Simon for emceeing, shouted out her mentor and former Mayor Willie Brown — “Willie Brown just turned 90 this year, and I’m gonna say 90 is the new 70 on him — and I’m gonna say 50 is the new 30 on me” — and offered gratitude to the attendees for their “love and care” for the city.
“Under the Breed administration, everybody is welcomed,” Breed said, “and that’s what I have tried to do every single day that I’ve done this job. I’ve done it with love in my heart, with focus, with determination, and with the hardcore, tough-love spirit of my grandmother, Miss Comelia Brown.”
While Breed often talks about her upbringing when stumping for votes, this time she directly connected her administration’s policies to how she was reared. Breed has, in recent months, railed against harm-reduction approaches to addiction recovery, pushed arrests of drug dealers and users alike, and said the goal of recent “very aggressive” sweeps of encampments is to make the unhoused “so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.”
“Y’all know, back in the day, if you messed up, you got a whooping,” she said on Friday. “But then she fed you right after. That’s the kind of tough love I’m bringing to the mayor’s office.”
“No, I may not give you a whooping with a belt. I just might give you another kind of whooping.”
‘OC’ to Da Mayor to Room 200
Many of those celebrating with Breed on Friday night go back a long way, and it was clear that London Nicole Breed, born on Aug. 11, 1974, leaves few behind.
Breed is, as she says often on the campaign trail, a child of the Fillmore projects: She was raised in OC, the “Outta Control” Buena Vista Plaza East public housing complex at Turk and Laguna streets, and stayed there until she left for the University of California, Davis.
Breed was at the time “always energetic … always a sweet, sweet girl, passionate about everything,” said Stan Perkins, who grew up with Breed in Plaza East and went to school with her at Galileo High. “Always in the books, always studying, always just with the school,” added his wife, Lentise, who lived down the street from the project. The couple stood together reminiscing outside Harrington’s.
Both have known Breed for decades: Lentise was her roommate when Breed stayed on Treasure Island about 20 years ago, she said. The two lived with Lentise’s daughter, and Breed was “an aunt and a mentor” to the young girl.
“This is how good friends we are: She married us,” she said, pointing to her and her husband. “I was her roommate. She took me to the hospital and was in the room with me when I had my son. No kidding. That’s how close we are.”
“Her grandmother pierced my mother’s ears,” Stan added. “My mother and her mother were friends. I grew up with her. I grew up with her brothers … We ate free lunch together. We went on Great America trips and things of that nature.”
Breed was clearly good at school, Stan said, but “to be truthfully honest, I didn’t see mayor. I didn’t see mayor, but I did see — ”
“Someone that was gonna be successful,” Lentise interjected. “Someone that was going to be successful,” Stan echoed, nodding. “Absolutely, absolutely.”
For the majority of her life, Breed has been in politics, first as an intern and campaign staffer for Brown in the late 1990s, then District 5 supervisor, and now an incumbent facing a tough campaign against well-heeled opponents to her right and experienced legislators to her left.
“She’s one of my prizes, my prize candidate — period,” recalled Brown, the former mayor, holding an $18 glass of white wine and wearing a black fedora and purple suede-looking jacket. Brown remembered Breed as “equally as aggressive, extremely well-informed, highly opinionated on the subject matter … and a great student on the listening side,” which he called the No. 1 qualification for public office.
“You do not operate on the theory that you know everything,” he continued. “Only one person ever did that, and it was me! It’s a mistake. But, then again, I kind of thought I knew everything.”
In 2002, Breed became the head of the African American Art & Culture Complex in the Fillmore, three blocks from her former childhood apartment, when she was 28. The move was fortuitous: At the perch of the influential nonprofit, Breed was able to amass support in the neighborhood and city. She then used her standing to run for District 5 supervisor in 2012 against the Ed Lee-appointed incumbent, Christina Olague.
She won that race by 3,277 votes, a 56 to 44 tilt, and was voted into the presidency of the Board of Supervisors by her colleagues in 2015. She was one heartbeat away from Room 200 and, in 2017 when then-Mayor Lee suffered a fatal heart attack at just 65, she took control.
“It was shocking and traumatic the night that Ed Lee died,” said P.J. Johnston, another Brown acolyte who has known Breed since the late ’90s, when the two “basically lived in the campaign headquarters for months on end” during Brown’s 1999 race. “She gets sworn in as mayor. We’re at San Francisco General Hospital … and so you become mayor, but there’s no joy in it.”
Johnston said the ascension did not feel like a victory. That would have to wait until 2018, when Breed beat both then-Sen. Mark Leno and then-Supervisor Jane Kim for the top post in a special election. It was a grueling ordeal; Breed won over Leno by just 2,546 votes, 1.1 percent, and “it took two weeks to settle the 2018 election,” Johnston said, but it gave Breed a deserved victory lap.
“London Breed is pretty good at experiencing joy,” Johnston said. “In July, after she was sworn in, we had a great party with Morris Day — and we danced.”
And on Friday night, Breed made it clear that she was ready to dance again.
“You with me?” Breed asked the raucous crowd at the end of her birthday speech. Then, making a reference to Donald Trump’s comments last month that immigrants are “taking Black jobs,” she looked forward. “Let’s go and let’s win this thing — because I’m trying to keep my Black job.”
Hmm. 50! Looks good!
Here’s wishing her good health, much happiness, and a long life of enjoying those things, as well as meaningful employment outside of California politics.