<Begin Segment 13>

TI: Now, what law school did you go to? And tell me a little bit about your class going in, in terms of gender, race...

DM: I went to UC Berkeley Law School. I had applied to a number of places but I wanted to kinda stay not too far away from California. I got a full scholarship to SC to go to law school there so my dad was totally upset when I decided I was gonna go to Berkeley, 'cause Berkeley had a culture that was just evolving in, not just evolving. They've always been a different kind of place that essentially valued individualism. And allowed people to do a lot of different things and... which is absolutely the mirror -- excuse me, the opposite image of what Gardena was like. So we had a big argument about that. We had a falling out for that, about that and the Vietnam war, and we didn't talk to each other hardly for a couple of years, maybe a couple, three years, hardly at all. So, but I went to Berkeley.

TI: Was this really the first time you really broke from your father, too? Over something like this?

DM: Actually, no. I used to argue with him all the time. In fact, my older brothers were appalled at the way I would argue. I just was arguing. I always was just rebellious. 'Cause I'd stay out late and play poker with my friends. You know, in those days I really didn't drink or do, I didn't do drugs or anything like that. Even though I was underage, I didn't drink. I didn't particularly care for it like I do now. [Laughs] But, I'd stay out late with my friends and somehow I would always get in arguments with him. And I think we were very similar personalities, which, both kind of headstrong. So they were appalled. So this was a continuation, pretty much, of our relationship.

TI: Okay. And so you're now at Cal.

DM: So, and I'm at Cal, at Berkeley. The first week I'm there, the Third World Strikes start in San Francisco State. There were boycotts and pickets all over the place. There's demonstrations, riots, tear gas, police everywhere both at San Francisco State and Berkeley. And I'm thinking, "Wow, this is really a wild place." In my class there were five other Asians. One from Hawaii, one from Chinatown, one from LA, there were just five total out of a class of 170. There were probably around ten or twelve Mexican Americans or Hispanics and maybe around fifteen African Americans, if that, very few women, very few women. So it wasn't what you'd call a diverse class, although, by Boalt standards now, it may be diverse 'cause of the way Boalt has gone. And it was a class that was kind of interesting, 'cause in 1968 what you saw was a cataclysmic year and the intersection of these various movements seemed to have come to Berkeley at one point in time and that was the anti-war movement which was huge in the Bay Area. I mean, it was a hotbed of dissent in Berkeley and San Francisco and Oakland for that matter. You had the counterculture movement, which is the tune in, turn on, drop out; drugs, alternate lifestyles, disrespect for any rules that were ever created, was, alternate consciousnesses. That's part of that movement. At the same time you had the Ethnic Studies Third World Strike movement, the Civil Rights movement, come home in the form of the need for relevant education for people of color. That was the format it took. Rather than... we didn't have those kinds of issues of segregation like down South, or sitting in the back of the bus, but the form it took was demand for relevant education from the schools.

All of those were, happened in a year, where Robert Kennedy got assassinated, John Carlos and Tommie Smith put their hand in the air with a black glove in the Mexican, at the Olympics in Mexico City in 1968. There was the demonstrations and the Democratic National Convention where there were tons of violence. So it was a really, really crazy year in that one particular year. It just kind of carried over into my law school education where, where, you know, we're out of class, maybe, a third of the time.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.