<Begin Segment 7>

PJ: And so by Monday morning -- so we had, so I got an appointment with Jim McDermott for Monday morning, and I had never met with him. And so Sunday night, I think it was about nine-thirty at night and I remember thinking, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to meet with a U.S. congressman." And I had really not done political stuff before this work. All of my work had been international development but not, not domestic political stuff. And so I thought I really should have something to give to him, you know, something written. I'm gonna meet with him and I have no idea what I'm really gonna ask him. And so I sat down and I think I finished it at about eleven o'clock 'cause I once went back to my computer to look at the document, you know, the original document to see what time I finished it and I think it was about eleven, eleven or eleven-fifteen at night. And I wrote at the top: "Hate Free Zone Campaign of Washington" and then I had this very broad mission about stopping hate in the state of Washington and making sure that Washington state was welcoming to people from all religions and cultures and ethnicities and I think I had sexualities in there. I mean, it was a very, very broad statement. And then I, it's the, my, the way I've always liked to think is, you know, "What if there were no limits?" "So what would you do if you could do anything?" kind of thing. And so I came up with these four things: political advocacy, direct community support -- because it was very clear people had nowhere to turn. There was no help line, there was nothing. And when I had done my research over the weekend, I had found that the State of California actually has a statewide helpline for hate crimes and discrimination. We didn't have anything like that. So that was in there, and then education and training, I felt like we've gotta work with schools if we're gonna make a difference. And then the fourth was media and public awareness.

And so I met with Jim the next morning. It's a one-page document, met with Jim the next morning, introduced myself, handed him the sheet of paper, and said, "I really think we need to do something." He was right there because he knows the South Asian community very well and he had heard about the Sikhs and he pulled out the Martin Niemohler quote that morning, I remember, and said, "Yes, we need to do something," he said, "What should we do?" And I said, "Well, I think we should have a press conference and we should get the governor and the mayor and the King County Executive and you and other key people, and we should do it at a prominent place and, you know, just state that this is unacceptable." And he said, "That's a great idea, when should we do it?" I said, "Well, how about tomorrow?" [Laughs] And he turned around and looked at me and said, "Who are you?" 'Cause we had never met before. And he said, "How do you expect to get the governor and everybody -- and tomorrow, I mean..." I said, "Well, it's great timing, you know, September 11th was on a Tuesday, this would be one week from September 11th, all of these things have happened, there'd be a real reason to come out." I said, "Politically, it would be something that everybody would want to be a part of." You know, and then I said, "But the real work is after the press conference." I said, "We have to figure out what to do about this." And so, he, he was great. He said, "Okay, well, let's put my staff on it," and so we all sat around a table and his staff made a bunch of calls and we had another meeting that Monday at about four o'clock.

And I think from Jim's office I went to another meeting at the Washington Association of Churches. And there were a whole variety of groups, the Labor Council and the WAC and the ADL and a bunch of other groups had gathered there to talk about, "What should we do?" And I said, "Well, you know, we've got this press conference and how about supporting that? And here's my proposal for how we should deal with this issue." [Laughs] And so they all came to this meeting at four o'clock on Monday afternoon that Jim had called. And I remember Judy Nicastro from the city council was there and I think Peter Steinbrook and I forget who the other, but there were three or four council members who came, Gary Locke's person, somebody from his office came and somebody from Ron Sims' office came. And so there were a number of different groups and people represented there and, you know, we had gotten the space at the Seattle Center for noon on Tuesday the 18th. And it was a planning meeting for that, and so we held the press conference the next day at twelve o'clock. And when I got there Jim was handing out, he had made copies of my one-pager and he was handing them out to people and introducing me saying, "This is Pramila Jayapal of Hate Free Zone Campaign of Washington." And I was saying, "Um, no, no. I'm writing my book. I'm taking six months off to write my second book." [Laughs] But that's what happened.

And then in the days following that, I think it became very clear that it wasn't just individual attacks, but within a month or two, we realized that it was the government targeting people which has still not stopped. You know, arresting people without any evidence, and there's this recent case of the man in Portland, Oregon who was arrested for the bombings in Spain and was held under this order that allows people to be held without actually, with no evidence, because of, quote, "suspicions of being terrorist," involved in terrorist activity. So our activity continued. Really the big, first big political thing we did was with the Somali grocery stores that were shut down after September 11th -- or not shut down, but disqualified from the USDA's Food Stamp program. And the more research we did into that, the more we found it was linked to terrorism. That was kind of the big, first big profile thing we did.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.