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MA: In going back to the Asian American Political Alliance, what types of things were they fighting for or what was their mission?

JH: Well, at that time, there was, you know, as I say, there were things associated with the, with the civil rights. Civil rights was fair play and employment and housing and all these kind of things. And I was involved in some of those kinds of things in Mill Valley where I lived, it's kind of an upper-middle-class area. And so we would go down and send a black couple in to a real estate agent, and they would say, "Oh, that place is already rented," or something like that. Then we'd send a white couple in, and of course, it would be available. And so we'd go and picket the place. We did things like that. And similar things were happening in employment, companies were being picketed and that sort of thing. And then, the students began pushing for courses that were more oriented towards their own life experiences. And at that time, there was a kind of a radical teacher by the name of Nathan Hare that the university hired, sort of as a way of hedging their bets against the pressure that they were getting from the students that was building up. And as I say, the ethnic student organizations formed a coalition called the Third World Liberation Front, and they're the ones that pushed and started the strike. But the, that year, this coalition got involved in the social sciences because the social science division decided to organize a kind of ethnic studies class in response to all this pressure that's building up, and Nathan Hare was going to give the lectures. But it was the social science division, that's where I was in, so that the dean came to me and said, "Would you be the official faculty member for that class?" And I said, "Okay," sounded interesting and all that. And so I started to organize the class, talking to Nathan Hare about his lectures. And I was getting my graduate students in anthropology to become TAs in that class.

MA: I'm just curious about the curriculum for that class and what you focused on.

JH: Well, you know, this is what I was going, leading up to, is that when I met with Nathan Hare and the leaders of the Third World Liberation Front, all the student leaders, the Black Students Union and the Latino organization, Chicano organization, and the Native Americans, we met to talk about how we should organize the class and what we should lecture. And the students just lit into me. And I had my assistants there ready to go, and they said, "Nathan Hare's going to do all the lecturing, you don't lecture at all." And then they said, "We're gonna do the TA work, not your, your anthropology students." And I was wondering, "What the heck is going on?" And all during this period, I was trying to catch up on what was going on politically. And so I was treating that course as, like any other course we where the teacher has sort of control over the curriculum and everything else. And so I was adapting, and I says, "Well, if you guys don't want me to lecture, that's fine with me." And then that fall, I think maybe we only had about a month of classes, and the strike started. So we never finished that term. And the strike lasted for several months, and after that, you know, I was eventually appointed the... well, the strike ended in the, we won the right to start Ethnic Studies, there were faculty positions allocated and everything else. And the first year, I was splitting my time fifty percent with anthropology, fifty percent with Asian American Studies. And I was appointed the chair of Asian American studies.

MA: I was curious about the strike. Did faculty also strike with the students?

JH: Yeah. The students struck first, and then the faculty union joined them.

MA: Which you were a part of, okay.

JH: Yeah. So I found myself on the picket line right away, and picketing with the students.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.