<Begin Segment 19>

TI: And what were some of the cases you were handling at that time?

DM: We were handling nothing at the time except for this one woman who came in. And we had this old insurance office. And in the insurance office was a safe. Every morning this semi-crazy Chinese woman would come in, who worked next door and say, "Can I use your safe?" We go, "What for?" She goes, "It's really cool in there and I want to stick my sandwich in there." So she'd store her lunch in our safe all the time. After about three days she goes, "What do you guys do here?" We go, "We're a law firm. We give legal services." And I remember, every time she'd come in, too, a bunch of us would be in the back, we'd be playing chess. There was nothing going on. And then she'd, the door, we'd hear the ding, ding, ding, ding. Everybody's jump up and go, "A client, a client." We'd all rush to the front and probably scared the hell out of her. But then it just turned out to be her. Well, it turns out she referred us some consumer case, And then Garrick got his friend to write an article about us. Then a woman named Susan Amazol, a Filipina from, who had just quit her job at the Examiner, as a reporter, probably the first Filipino who worked there, Filipina, came, volunteered to do publicity for us. So we started getting some press.

So then we started getting these little cases, some criminal, some civil, nothing big until a guy named Barry Chan walked in the door in August, this was August or September of 1972. Barry Chan had been beaten up. Not beaten up, he got his camera smashed. He was taking pictures of the police officers who were at that time going through Chinatown yanking everybody who had a black jacket, every young Chinese American man with a black jacket and doing mass round-ups, handcuffing 'em, taking 'em down to Central Station not far away, photographing 'em, getting their fingerprints and letting 'em go. Totally unconstitutional. No probable cause, they hadn't committed any crime. They were creating a gang notebook so they could use it in the future with all the pictures. So Barry walks in and says, "I wanna sue them. They broke my camera. They took me down there." He got caught into the whole thing 'cause he was taking pictures of the police doing these unconstitutional things. So to do a lawsuit like that is totally expensive, but Barry Chan was the grandson of the Shoong family. I don't know if you ever heard of them. There's tons of books about them now. Who were related to Chiang Kai-shek, on the Shoong Foundation. Joseph Shoong who was the National Dollar Store's founder. And so we thought, whew, boy. So we asked him for a ton of money, which at that time was like ten thousand dollars. Which isn't a ton by today's standards, which we desperately needed to survive. And so, Barry brought the money in. We had to do a lawsuit and a whole series of pleadings, very complex things within two days. And we brought everybody in.

MC: So it was a civil rights lawsuit?

DM: Civil rights lawsuit against the police.

MC: Based on --

DM: An injunction to stop unconstitutional search and seizure, seizures, and arrests. And so that was the first case we worked on, was Barry Chan. And it was our first exposure to really high level federal litigation. We didn't know what we were doing but we had then enlisted the help of a Jewish guy named Dennis Roberts. He used to work for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, heavyweight guy, guy worked with Angela Davis, real lefty lawyer. But Dennis wanted to get involved. He had come back from New York. He went to Berkeley and worked all around the country and he goes, he just wanted to help us. And he was great. He gave us tons of advice and helped us. Ken helped us. A guy named Joe Morizumi, another Japanese, older Japanese American lawyer became one of our mentors. Because there weren't Japanese Americans who did civil rights work at all. There really weren't. And very few who did anything marginally progressive 'cause Japanese American lawyers had to survive. They were trying to make their own living and things so it was hard for them to do that. And so that was the first, first big case we worked. And since then, at the Caucus then we sued the attorney general for, we created this theory of group defamation because he had stuck out this, put out this criminal pamphlet, criminal bulletin saying Chinese Americans smoke opium and gamble, they're all... it was real broad strokes. Of course we got defeated totally by the first amendment. It got kicked out of court real fast. But the notion was to create enough of a controversy using the lawsuit, using it for political means to embarrass him, which is what happened. So he withdrew the bulletin. We got what we wanted, essentially.

MC: So you were using law as a type of a political education tool as opposed to just sort of winning cases for your clients?

DM: Correct. You know, I read a very influential book early on called Law Against the People. And then when I was in law school I started reading the more left radical tracks about the use of law. And one of the theses was, and it made total sense to me, is that, too many lawyers go into court, or take cases trying to be the white knight, to be the savior of this group, or these people. And all you do is win a temporary victory in court that is not enduring or lasting. The idea was, and this came though the work of organizing social welfare workers. And this one lawyer took, was talking about taking their case, and changing the law, and thinking he'd won a great victory. Then he had to leave and all of a sudden they changed the law and these people were back to where they started. So the idea was to use the law, or a legal issue, to get people organized to demand their own rights politically. You can use the law as a tool to either get a temporary victory, to preserve a temporary victory, but the whole point was really is to have the political strategy developed from the grass roots up. You don't do it, either. Because once you're gone, you can't be the leader of that group. You have to develop leadership. And I really believe that theory. I believe, I still believe that theory, that you have to use law to create more enduring political empowerment for people. And so that evolved into the whole idea of using law for education. Because that's a form of, sometimes you don't have the direct group to work with but you can at least agitate. You can educate in using the law. And you don't necessarily have to win the case.

MC: Right. So law is not the centerpiece, then, it's really one arm of a more broad political organization, political/social movement.

DM: It is.

MC: Uh-huh.

DM: It is.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.