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JG: So would you describe yourself, I mean, in these years leading up to college... I mean, were you politically active, or was this just kind of... 'cause knowing you know, I'm interested in this kind of, your own kind of political development, the genesis of this kind of political awakening in your own life. I mean, would you characterize this as the period when that began, or was that something that occurred later on?

MN: To the extent that I became and am politically active, that really didn't start 'til, actually, after college. Most likely during my seminary days, or maybe even after that. However, those experiences, to the extent that my political consciousness was shaped and formed and developed during that period, I think I could say that yes, that's when my political development started. Even when I was in college at UCLA, even though the big excitement on campus was Bill Walton and Marques Johnson leading UCLA to basketball championships, and even UCLA went to a Rose Bowl one year during that period, even though you had things like that happening... again, it was the seventies, late seventies and there were, it was still a, really a time when there was a lot of political ferment in the country. Even thought the U.S. was deescalating in Vietnam, we were involved in Chile and things happening in Latin America and, and the protests, the marches that happened on campus at UCLA, which I saw, didn't participate in them, but I saw, really had an impact on me.

I do remember one very, very profound experience that happened during that time, also, and it was when Alex Haley, the author of the book Roots, came and spoke on campus. And at one point in the, his talk, he mentioned that he never really aspired to be a writer, but he had an experience when he was in the merchant marines, I believe it was, and the experience he had was, not only was he one of the few black sailors on his ship as a merchant marine, he was also one of the few literate members of the crew, black or white. And after a while he had the white sailors coming to him, asking them, asking him to read their letters to them, because they were illiterate, and Alex Haley said some of these letters were very personal. It wasn't just letters from Mom and Dad, but it was letters from their girlfriends or from their wives, but these white sailors were, couldn't read or write. They could neither read nor write, so they had Alex Haley read their letters back to them and then after that asked him to compose their letters that they couldn't write, but to dictate to him the letters, and he wrote the letters. And he's, Alex Haley said, "I felt embarrassed writing some of this stuff," but that's where he learned how to write, and then the rest is history. He later became an author and so on and so forth. But I've never forgotten that story because every now and then when I sit down to write something, whether it's a church newsletter article or an article for a local paper or, or something like that, I think about that story as well. That here's a world renowned author who maybe went to college, but learned how to write as, as a merchant marine, and when you think about it, he learned how to write from people who were illiterate and couldn't read nor write. And that's where he got his experience. In a roundabout way, those experiences like that had a hand in shaping my political consciousness as well. So yes, to a certain extent you could say that's when my political activism, to the extent that you can call it that, really began, because it began with the shaping and the formation of my political and social consciousness and awareness back then.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.