Densho Digital Archive - Bob Santos Interview II (denshovh-sbob

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TI: As, as now Asian Americans are coming out more, were you getting pressure, or other Asian Americans getting pressure from, I guess, the older generation? I'm thinking in the Japanese American community some of the, the older Niseis, if they were critical of this activism. Same thing in the Filipino community, were you getting sort of pressure, like, "Bob, back off"? I mean, was that happening during this time?

BS: That, now we move into the International District issues and InterIm. When the Kingdome was planned lot of, a guy named, a guy named Sabino Cabildo, he was RCP. He was a Communist. And he called me one day and said, "Bob, we should have, we should get some people together to fight the idea of having a Kingdome -- or a, not the Kingdome then, a stadium -- built in the community. And this is about the same time, well, right after I-5 was built to the ID and I-90 was being planned for the south end, and then so you had a multipurpose stadium on the west end, so it was the Asian, the Filipino activists that said, "What's gonna happen to our manongs, our oldtimers, our alaskeros? They're gonna be displaced out of their homes." So the Filipino activists were the first ones to meet. Pete Bacho, his brother Norris Bacho, Selmi Domingo and Nomisio Domingo, and Sabino, and myself, we started to talk about how, how do we, how do we fight this intrusion of all this development that is surrounding the International District and will eventually -- and we looked at the hotel, I Hotel issue in San Francisco. Remember the International Hotel? That was the last building in the old Manilatown, and that became a symbol of, of Asian activism, trying to keep that building open for the old people that lived in that building. So that idea of fighting to keep that alive in San Francisco transferred into Seattle to keep the Filipino Manilatown alive in Seattle. And it so coincided with a lot of other Asian activists that were now being concerned about the health and future of the first generation.

So the first meetings were held at St. Peter Claver Center by these Asian activists, Filipino activists and Asian activists, and I even have a photo of that meeting. That was a great meeting. And we're talking about using the organization that was formed by the business community called InterIm, International District Improvement Association. Starting, we should start attending those meetings that InterIm was holding. InterIm was started by the property owners, the business owners, as a quasi chamber of commerce. Tomio Moriguchi and Shigeko Uno, Terry Toda, Don Chin, they started InterIm, and we, the Asian activists, we started attending their meetings. InterIm was funded in part, we got a contract from the Model Cities Program. It was a federal program. Money came from the federal government to the city of Seattle to talk about issues within a sector of Central Area and downtown Seattle that included the International District, so the federal funds were coming into the city to fund community groups within that model city boundary. In the International District we were part of that boundary, so we said we're eligible for some of this money.

So we wrote a little proposal and the Model City advisory committee met at Seattle U library to vote on the funding of these proposals that came in, and one came from InterIm, and the person that presented the proposal to the group was Tomio Moriguchi. And I didn't, that's the first time I had met Tomio, because I was on the advisory committee of the Model City Program because I was part of St. Peter Claver Center. So the vote, the vote to fund the first, to fund, the vote to fund InterIm came out fourteen to fourteen. It was a tie vote, 'cause most of the, most of the blacks were saying the Asians don't have any problems. That's when that first came out. So the chairman of the Model City Program there was Judge Charles Johnson, and he voted to oppose the funding, and I could have killed him, but he was a judge, right? So we woke up to the fact that, it's okay, we're not gonna get funding, but we really have to be in a position to educate the black community and other ethnic communities on the plight of the neighbors and the people in the International District who would be displaced with all this development that's going on. People didn't understand it. Everybody thought if, and now, it's now that the Kingdome is being planned and the idea of construction of this multipurpose Kingdome, people outside the community said, "Well, it's gonna help your community. You're gonna have sixty thousand people going to your restaurants and going through the International District."

TI: Just going back, I was just thinking about that meeting, the fourteen, fourteen and then the tiebreaker.

BS: Yeah.

TI: I mean, tactically, in hindsight, would it have been better if more of an activist had presented the InterIm proposal rather than Tomio, who was a businessperson so he had a successful store that he was representing? I was just thinking of, yeah, the politics in terms of how it was perceived if someone like you or more of an activist...

BS: Well actually, the InterIm hadn't been infiltrated yet.

TI: Okay. So they were all businesspeople.

BS: They were all businesspeople and property owners, and they had just won an award. Metropolitan, City of Seattle Metropolitan Club gave InterIm an award for beautifying the International District with new lighting, got rid of the prostitution problem, and the community was starting to rise up. But InterIm, the InterIm meetings then, that's when we started, after they lost the Model City funding, there was a guy named Eric Inoue, he was the staff person at InterIm, and he got people involved in helping him write a new proposal. Donna Yee, Louise Kamikawa, a lot of these students from the University of Washington School of Social Work, they became involved in the International District.

TI: So the business component realized that they weren't, they need that help.

BS: They didn't know that yet.

TI: So there's still some fighting in terms of, fighting about --

BS: We were a bunch of Communists, you know? Really. Here, all of a sudden the business community and InterIm, they're having their meetings and then these activists started infiltrating the monthly meetings, and it came to a point where there's a lot of disagreement about whether the stadium would be good for the district or bad for the district. And at time, at the time of electing the executive committee, there were just as many of us as there were the businesspeople at election time, and we could vote. It was open voting. You didn't have to be a, all you had to be is interested in the International District. You didn't have to be an owner or a business owner.

TI: Just be at that meeting, if you were at that meeting.

BS: Just be at the meeting, and so we had some of our people that were elected to the executive committee. I think it included Donna Yee and some other folks like that, and so when that happened a lot of the more conservative businesspeople at InterIm, they decided they didn't want to deal with these Communists. And that's what we were called, called Communists, Socialist or whatever. So they left InterIm, and the people who stayed were people like Tomio, Shigeko Uno, Dr. Terry Toda, 'cause they were very intrigued by the passion, the energy and the smarts of the young activists. Tomio was very cool then. He didn't agree with us at all, but he said, he started thinking together we may be, because of the vote that was taken, he himself thought, if we do start accepting this activism maybe next year when the vote comes out we will get the funding from Model City. He and Shigeko and some of these folks, they talked about that, just like you brought up, maybe it should've been some of us to present that. Well the next year, when we applied for funding we got the funding. It was almost unanimous.

TI: And who presented? Who...

BS: I forgot who did it. It might've been me or someone else, but I think I was, I think I was hired soon after that. But the community was really divided, the International District. It was hard, it was hard... I was hired by InterIm in 1972, but I didn't start work until '73 'cause I, the Model City money was hung up by (Mayor Wes) Uhlman. He didn't want me running the show down there.

TI: But going back to this, this whole InterIm, and I'm curious about some of the more longstanding Japanese American communities, like the JACL. Were they at all involved with civil rights and some of these activism movements during this time?

BS: There were individuals, but not so much as an organization. They were sort of standing apart. I wasn't a member of JACL, so I don't know what was happening internally, but you had Tomio and all these folks that were a part of JACL, Shigeko, and at their meetings they must've been discussing what was happening with InterIm and the new crop of young activism that were involved in trying to preserve the community.

TI: Especially when you think about, their stated mission is civil rights, here we were in the midst of the largest civil rights movement in Seattle, and I'm just curious, where were they during this time?

BS: They weren't opposing us, and as I say, there were individuals. There might've been some actions taken by JACL supporting some of the, some things we're doing, but some of the things we're doing were just spur of the moment kinds of demonstrations against the Kingdome, the occupation of the HUD building in 1972 or 1973. There were actions that were taken right after a meeting, the next day we'd be in the streets, so there wasn't very much time for the organizations, like JACL or the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, to really react.

TI: What's your sense, thinking back to those years, sort of in the '60s, was it because they wouldn't react, or did you have a sense that, even asked, would they have participated in the way you wanted?

BS: I think because we were so far left that they didn't want to be perceived as supporting a leftist group, you know? Some people would brand us as Communist and I don't know where that came from, but hell, we didn't want to be involved in that political thing, even Democrats, Republicans, Communists, Sandinistas. Didn't matter to us. We had, our goal was to, was preserve the neighborhood for the people, the pioneers who built it. What we did was we looked at other neighborhoods similar to ours in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and we saw that neighborhoods were being lost. Manilatown in San Francisco, completely wiped out. Little Tokyo was being wiped, the residential population was being wiped out to make Little Tokyo more of a tourist attraction, and they were fighting for many years to try to keep it a residential base, but they lost it out. So, learning that, we said we will not, that will not happen in Seattle. Preserving either the buildings or building new buildings for the residents who built this community was the number one priority. Tomio, Shigeko, and those businesspeople agreed with that, to a point.