<Begin Segment 24>

MN: So you mentioned Asian Hardcore, what did Asian American Hardcore focus on?

Mo N: Drug abuse and people coming out of prison, at-risk youth on the street. So all the things that the community was finding real difficult to deal with, we tried to deal with. So we had a series of houses, 28th Street House, that was the apartment loaned to us by Dr. Noguchi, and then we were able to get a place in SC's redevelopment for a dollar a year, so 32nd Street School, 32nd Street House, and we had that for, I think, a year or two years. And we did communal living there, and we had a whole lot... we had a house full of druggies and everything else going on there. And we did serve the people, working with at-risk youth in the different outlying areas, working directly with people ourselves.

MN: Was this modeled after the Black Panthers?

Mo N: Well, we tried to, yeah, as best we could. The Black Panther Party was our role model, yeah.

MN: Did you have connections with Richard Aoki? Richard Aoki, who was one of the early Black Panthers?

Mo N: Well, we knew who he was. We didn't have a lot of direct connections. Richard was mainly an Oakland cat, but we knew who he was and we knew about him, especially through the Berkeley strike, Third World Liberation Front, one of the heads.

MN: Now you mentioned Thomas Noguchi, so can you share with us, in '69, Thomas Noguchi was fired from the Los Angeles coroner's position. How were you involved in that?

Mo N: Well, we had the JACS office, and whenever things came down in the community, I think our reputation was that at least you could go there and get a hearing, you wouldn't be turned down. So his case came, and Victor and the people from the YB really jumped on it, right?

MN: Yellow Brotherhood, when you say YB.

Mo N: Yeah, yeah. And so they supported him, and then when we heard about what they were saying about him, made him sound like he was some fucking crackpot Jap doing his thing. And pretty much it was said just like that. So we just, the whole community formed up behind him and going to his thing, his hearing every day and stuff like that. A lot of our people got radicalized in that process. And this guy was a pretty big guy, and they were picking on him like he was turd. So, yeah...

MN: So when you started to live in the collective, is that why, is it after that that Thomas Noguchi allowed you guys to live in his apartment?

Mo N: No, actually, he was renting to two people that we were friends with, and we just kind of took over their place. And then we kind of presented Noguchi with the thing, that, "Oh, yeah, we live in your place, and we ain't got no money." And what he said was, he let us stay there in one apartment, and we worked on cleaning up his yard and shit like that.

MN: So that was at 28th Street, right?

Mo N: Yeah.

MN: And then you moved to the, you said the USC...

Mo N: 32nd Street.

MN: And then after that is when the Community Workers Collective...

Mo N: Forms, yeah.

MN: In Boyle Heights, right?

Mo N: Yeah.

MN: And what was that like? How did you support yourself?

Mo N: Well, CWC was... well, the way it split up was that in the Hardcore, we had come and we had gone to Chicago and recruited this guy, Shiga Ono, he was part of the weathermen, and he was doing time at Cook County jail during the Days of Rage. And so we sent people, or people went up there and visited him on their way to New York, come back, so we made arrangements to get him paroled out to us instead of doing hard time in prison. So he was paroled out to us, so he came and he'd been trained by a whole bunch of different things, but he basically comes out of the Community Party Youth League. And he's trained by the Party school and stuff like that. So we're pretty impressed by this cat, and so he says that what we need is a separate place away from the Serve the People work, and you can't have that as a twenty-four hour kind of thing hanging around your neck. And so we hadn't experienced that, all we knew was we were directly immersed in Serve the People and Cadre Development. But he separated Cadre Development from Serve the People, so we said, "Okay, let's try it." That's when we formed CWC which was for Cadre Development. And Marlene refused to participate in that, and she helped form the New People's Hardcore with the understanding that anytime she needed help, we would go help her. She said it wasn't much help, and we kind of shined her on. Probably did. So we got into a more politically oriented study, and giving more direction to, political direction to the work that we were doing, and it was a great thing. So that's when I became really convinced that Marxism and dialectical materialism was the real, was the skinny in terms of how society develops.

In fact, it was at CWC that I go to Japan in 1971 to participate in the anti A and H bomb conferences at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We were in Hiroshima on the day, on the bombing, anniversary date of the bombing, the young people of the high school, or junior high school, that's the only thing that was left, and people were still in school, walk around with pictures of the kids that died from their school in the bomb. And it seemed like everywhere I looked, everywhere I turned, there were these lines of kids marching with these pictures. And it started to fuck with me. All these young people, all these children dying. And then that evening, they do this toro nagashi, too, paper boats, put the candle in there and put that on the river. I watched that for a while and I became overwhelmed by what I was sensing and feeling and seeing. So I went to a temple and I went into a graveyard where they had a bamboo thicket. So I went and sat down in the thicket, started thinking about, "Okay, how come all this shit is going on? What does this mean?" And, of course, the logical part of my brainwashing, part of the... Japan started the war, started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But I know better, I studied American history and I know goddamn well that they were fighting over China, right? So apparently the U.S. was gonna rip off China. So I knew that that was all right. But the conclusion was that the imperialist war of aggression is not healthy for the people or anybody. I became a stone anti-imperialist from that day forth, and I will never, ever back off on that.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.