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PW: So keep telling me more about these stories. So I know that there was an incident that also occurred on Park Street that was specific to Asian Americans?

MY: Yeah. I think that was, I can't remember exactly when that happened, but a friend and I were walking from the church to go have lunch one day, and as we were crossing the crosswalk, a guy in a pickup truck came up right next to us, and it was almost like to shock us, but he rolled down his window and he just yelled at us, "Go back to China, you damn Chinamen!" And we were just shocked. I mean, we were shocked that this guy came that close to us, but we were also shocked that he was saying this out loud in public. And so that said something to me about something going on in the city of Alameda. Then when, I think that happened before the incident with Niel Tam at the schools, but I think it set the course for an understanding that there were some racial dynamics going on in Alameda that it was important for us to address and look at. And when I look back on it, we think about that whole era that proceeded it, the Vincent Chin killing in Detroit, the anti-Japan, Japan-bashing, there were remnants of that, I think, still going on in a place like Alameda, but there were this dynamic of Alamedans coming in to, I mean, Asians coming in to Alameda. So what I began to understand from other people, particularly those in the white community, that there was a big backlash to the number of Asians that were coming into Alameda, because they were the fastest growing ethnic minority group in Alameda that had been, too, in some senses, more predominately white over its history.

PW: And add to that the whole military culture. And thinking about it, I hadn't reflected on it before, but I can see that having a place in that. So what do you do then? So you know that you're acknowledging these things within the congregation and you're discussing it. So how did it get moved out?

MY: There were two simultaneous kind of things going on. One was with the issue with Niel and the Asian American community. We had a couple of members, Roy Mita and his wife Joyce, who were involved at that school, and they created a committee to support Niel, and they wanted to retain him there. And they asked me to get involved in that, so I joined their meetings. And then Niel was actually blackballed from the district as a result of his being in the center of the storm, because district folks were really upset that he allowed himself to be kind of the center of this controversy. But they didn't deny the issues that were preeminent there around the lack of representation. And we ended up connecting as a church with what is called a community development program in the Methodist church. It's community organizing work that started kind of on the heels of the civil rights movement. It actually started after Martin Luther King was assassinated, and they started this fund with a program to help local churches do community organizing. So there was a particular methodology that came out of the Civil Rights Movement that then got supported for not only Black churches, but Asian, Latino and Native American churches as well. And so we had some consultants come out to talk with us about their methodology of organizing.

And so out of the incident with the Asian community, we formed a committee of community members and church members to work together on this particular issue. And what happened was people decided they needed to form a new organization that would have more clout because they felt that people were taking them seriously. When they went to the school board and when they come to public meetings, and that Asians were just dismissed. Whereas they were feeling like they didn't do that to the NAACP. So that kind of became the organizing mechanism. Roy, who was the parent who got me involved in it, he became our community organizer. He had been an organizer for General Motors and had been laid off, and so he had time and space to do that, it was really good. And so he became kind of our part time staff organizer on that particular issue. And there were folks in our church -- I actually want to name them for the record -- Shiz Kawamura was of the older generation, Ki Nomura, and I believe it was George Chin, who are church members who are on a committee working in partnership with community members who are Val Jue, Ben Lee and Arnie Fong. And it's interesting because the whole idea in this methodology is you work with church members and community members together on the issues but share your perspectives on what's going on. So you use the assets of the church and you use the assets of the community members together in partnership. It's not about proselytizing, it's about working in partnership with people. And so it was a way of developing a relationship with community members and also having them develop relationships with the church as well.

Arnie, long passed away, went on to become very prominent in working with the Asian community, not only in Alameda but across the East Bay in terms of empowerment for people in all civic offices from city councils to county boards and agencies and so forth, and really was kind of a driving force for that particular work. And Roy, as our organizer, kind of helped shape the development of this organization called the Organization of Alameda Asians, which then was present at the table for anything that was going on in the city. And it's interesting because our older members, when they first came together, we said, "Just be honest about how you feel about certain things," and they would say things like, "Well, we've been around this community for a long time, we don't expect anything to happen, but you have our blessings, go ahead and do what you need to do." And the folks who got involved with us, they had already been engaged, so they had a lot of energy and a lot of passion for what they want to do. It's an interesting dynamic to see all the church members and newer members of the community working together. And finally, when we were dealing with stuff in the school district, and they began to open the door to recruit more people of color, one of our members' sons, Ki Nomura, who's on the committee, his son Keith Nomura had been a principal in Berkeley. He was recruited to Alameda. He became, I believe, the first Japanese American administrator in Alameda. So there was a celebration at that time, when he got appointed to that position, and they said, "Well, you guys actually did something, more power to you."

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