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PJ: So I don't, I think I called several people. I think I listened to the news. I can't remember if I got, started getting calls that day. I don't think so. I think, I think most of the violence happened that day, the initial violence. And then I think it was on Wednesday that I started getting calls from the Sikh community. And there had been -- and I'd have to go back and look at the dates, I can't remember exactly which event happened when. But there had already been the first death of a Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, had happened. And there was a Sikh cab driver who was attacked, I believe it was on September 12th, could have been September 13th, in SeaTac, and so his family had called, through a friend of mine. Somebody had called me on their behalf. And then I started getting calls from Muslim women who were being harassed for going out into the community, some of them Pakistani, you know, because all of us wear, I mean, all of the Indian and the Somali and Muslim communities, if you're Sikh you wear head covering as well. And so it was clearly, I got several of those calls over the next couple of days. And I remember that it was Thursday or Friday maybe, my son was supposed to go out and my friend, Aaliyah, her friends were supposed to go to the zoo. And she called me and she said, "I'm not gonna send them to the zoo." She said, "I'm just, I'm too concerned." And I remember that I was gonna wear a salwar kameez one day, which I do periodically, about once a week or so I wear, wear Indian clothes and I remember I deliberately thought, "I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna wear this." And both that week and the next I remember several instances of walking, very vivid memories of walking downtown and just feeling people looking at me. And whether it was true or whether it was because I knew these things were happening to other people, it's hard for me to know.

But, so those calls continued. And then on Saturday morning I got a call, again was woken up very early, I forget what time it was, but six or six thirty, by a friend of mine who's a schoolteacher in south Seattle. And she was in tears and she said, "This is the third Muslim family that's pulling their kids out of my class because they're afraid to come to school." And it really was one of those moments where, you know, I think I burst into tears and, because I just thought, "What, what are we coming to? What is this? What is going on here?" And by that time Issa Qandeel, the Jordanian American man, had been, I think the Northgate incident had already happened where he was shot at and somebody was trying to pour gasoline around his, his car and blow it up.

AI: At the mosque?

PJ: At the mosque. And so the vigil had started around the mosque. And so there were several things that had already happened and you could sense this palpable feeling of hysteria in the air. And just the newspapers, of course, were full of the images of September 11th and the images of the people who had, who were supposedly responsible for September 11th were broadcast all over the place and so there was just this sense of tension and hysteria which, you know, I imagine lots of similarities to other times in history, but the whole nation's attention was on it. And in a way that, you know, was about every individual's safety but also the nation's safety. And so, I remember crying, and I remember just thinking, "I have, I have to do something. I have no idea what, but I have to do something." And so I called my friend in San Francisco and he said, "You know, I heard that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed this 'Hate Free Zone' resolution, and maybe you could do something like that." And I just was looking for something; I mean, just anything to do. And so I just decided that's what we needed to do, but we needed to do it for the state and somehow we had to get politicians to come out and make a statement about, that this was unacceptable and that we couldn't tolerate this, and this was not about Muslims or people wearing head-cover or Sikhs or Arabs, it was about this individual isolated group of people who had, who had committed these attacks.

And I remember I called up my friend Aaliyah and I said, "Okay, we have to start making some phone calls. I need your help." And she said, "What do you, what do you mean?" And I said, I said, "We have to do something and I have a plan." I had no plan, but I said I had a plan. [Laughs] And so I remember she made arrangements to drop her kids off somewhere, I think with a friend or something and she came over and we, literally, I think it was around noon. And we sat down at my kitchen table and I said, "Okay, these are the people we need to call," and I remember Ron Sims was on there and King County members and council members, city council members and we just started calling people and saying, "This is what we want to do; we want to have a resolution, we want to pass it, we want to have it for the state." It's very funny for me to think of now because it's been two and a half years and I think I had no idea really what we were gonna do, I just knew that something had to be done and nobody seemed to be taking leadership on it.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.