<Begin Segment 8>

TI: But when I'm hearing your story, it felt like something very special happened to you about the time that you were going to graduate school or finishing graduate school at San Francisco State. Because not only with your work at Glide, but it's sort of like that's when you started joining the Third World Liberation Front, that's when you started working on the Japanese American Anthology and things. So a lot was happening...

JM: It was a revolution.

TI: It was like a wake-up --

JM: No, no, it was a revolution. It was a revolution. 1968, Ethnic Studies strike, and I was going to college, and I dropped out of college.

TI: And that's when S.I. Hayakawa was there?

JM: Yeah, we all ate kimchee and tried to breathe on him. No, I'm kidding. [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] That's great, I've got to remember that one next protest I go to.

JM: No, I'm kidding. Somebody suggested that, though. But he met with some of the Asian students and he fell asleep. [Laughs] While they were talking to him he fell asleep and started snoring.

TI: But revolution, what was happening? All this was going on...

JM: Well, I think, like I said at the Martin Luther King celebration -- excuse me if I'm doing too much stuff to myself -- that King and the Civil Rights Movement awakened a lot of fires, ignited a lot of fires. We were all smoldering. The Asian American movement, Native American movement, women's movement, LBGTQ movement, all of those movements, student movement, we were all smoldering. We were all very angry about something, some form of injustice. The Japanese community was pissed off about the camps and it was the Sanseis that took up the cause to get the reparation commission. I mean, we were just, we were boiling. And so it was like King's march across Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, can you imagine, in '65, was, I think, and we saw the people had been beaten, and the dogs being... and all of that happening. And we're going, "This is crazy, this is America, what's going on?" And, of course, in 1965, I would not have been able to marry Cecil, because interracial marriages were illegal. And we struggled for same-sex marriage for all those decades. But I think it quickened, what I say is it quickened the fire, it awakened us. It awakened something that was smoldering within us, and ignited our anger and our sense of demanding justice, activism, it activated us. So all the coalitions that we built around political prisoners, as you recall, that was when the Black Panthers were being persecuted and shot just wholesale, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Cecil was actually Angela Davis's spiritual advisor because that's the only way he could visit her in jail. And that's kind of a contradiction since she was a self-proclaimed communist. [Laughs]

But it was great, I mean, those were the days of an enormous urgency, it was enormously urgent for us to change society. It was enormously urgent for us to seek justice, it was life and death. And you know, when we marched on the campuses and they had the SWAT teams chasing us up and down the grassy knoll, and I watched as they, the cops would grab a woman by her hair and drag her on the ground by her hair. And it was, it was a matter of life or death. And it was also a time when the Chinese community were having their own gangs and those situations. I joined the Red Guard for a minute. By that time I had a two-year-old daughter so I was taking her to Red Guard meetings. [Laughs] But to this day I would say that that activism, even though it may change our tactics, and even though we may have grown in terms of our strategic thinking about how we best went about it, again, when you talk about protest, to have Cecil inviting the demonstrators who are outside and have them be a part of the celebration and to have their voices heard.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright (c) 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.