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PW: All right. So then I think I want to go back to San Francisco State specifically, 1967. What happened in 1967 at the college?

PY: So I'm enrolled in a program called Freshman Program of Integrated Studies, run by Edward Kauffman. So I really wasn't on campus that much because our classrooms were on downtown San Francisco on Powell Street in California. I was living in the dorms at that time on campus, and I was also working in the student cafeteria. So the first year up here, or the first six months, I'm still very, maybe transforming politically, but in terms of an Asian American or Japanese American consciousness, not so much. And so I'm slowly... so those first six months, I'm in this freshman program, just kind of class and racially, I had kind of grown up most of my life, mostly white. It wasn't until the beginning of the strike that there would, the summer before the strike, through Stan Wong who was in the dorms, I meet George Leong. And I think it was George who said, "You should come to this meeting of AAPA." "What's AAPA?" So in some ways, I'm out of synch with myself. Before I'd gone to an AAPA meeting, I had spent time at Stop the Draft week in Oakland, and I had participated in that. I was arrested during the Stop the Draft week. So I'm just beginning to kind of... the formation of, like, an Asian American consciousness just beginning. My opposition to the war is more developed than thinking of myself as a person of color, as an Asian American. And there again, because status had that diversity of experience, just like the music thing, it was so transformative. There was a meeting, I was working on the job, but there was a pre-strike meeting held by the BSU in a space adjacent to the student union. So I have my work garments on, and I went there to listen, I was curious. And then a certain point, somebody from the BSU leadership asked all the white people to leave, and I started to leave. And it was Terry Collins, who was part of the BSU leadership, he said, "Where are you going, Brother? You could stay. You're one of us." And it was really one of those, "Holy fuck," because I was leaving. And so all these things, it was right around that time, I was introduced to the folks at AAPA.

PW: Is that where you met Francis Oka?

PY: Francis? Yeah, it's like the first meeting, Penny Nakatsu, Miyo Ota, Jane Tabata, Francis Oka. I already knew Stan and George, they had been attending meetings before. It was a small group, and it was Penny who really was able to outline why we're there, what we were trying, attempting to do. And we didn't have a, AAPA was the low people on the totem pole, we didn't have the prior experience. We were a new organization, we didn't have the programs that all the other organizations had. That, combined with the sexism, always put Penny in a difficult position relative to the rest of the TWLF leaderships. We were complicit in kind of undermining Penny. Not intentionally, but Francis, George and I had all been approached by other members of other Third World organizations, that maybe you should start attending these meetings. In retrospect, I know they were trying to push Penny out. The leadership was all male at that point. None of us, neither George, Francis, or I had any business being there. Penny was always really clear. She's still one of the best people to talk about the experience of the strike and what that meant, and just what the Japanese American, Asian American participation. And so but it was, it was kind of the tenor of the times, that I'd be really interested to hear what she has to say about that. The state has done some work in terms of developing an oral history archives of the strike participants. But the people, graduate students who have been talking formally about this, doing research on this, I know that in my conversations with them that it's a subject that hasn't been brought up, and in some cases, I've been the first person to bring it up, the sexism that happened within the Third World Liberation Front at the time of the strike. Nobody's really kind of referred or kind of mentioned that there was a strike within the strike. The women stopped and said, "Fuck you guys." So in the middle of the struggle, people are getting arrested, all sorts of things, they had finally said, "Enough is enough," going to do a work stoppage. And their demands were so little, I mean, it's embarrassing to think about it. Just show up on time, be semi-polite. I don't know exactly how that was resolved, people went back to work. Just like in so many things, it's no surprise that women were crucial to keep that strike going. Just all the things that needed to be done. To keep any sustained operation going, we were largely organized by women.

The thing that I participated most in was getting people out of jail. So after all the activities, there would be arrests all the time. Part of our job was to kind of, this was organized by a woman named Margaret Lahe out of SDS. But I spent a lot of time at the end of the days at Barrish Bail Bonds, because that became our headquarters for seeing who got arrested, what condition they were, and getting them out of jail as quickly as possible. Jerry was this young progressive bail bondsman, and made minimal guarantees in terms of the bail procedures. In my case, when I got arrested, he would just come and get me.

PW: Well, back up. For somebody who doesn't even know what the Third World Liberation Front strike was, can you give us a brief definition?

PY: Yes. The strike emerged out of, like, students of color feeling that their histories, cultures, and needs were not being met. And it would be incumbent upon them to shape a program. And so this was, like, not just students, but faculty also. And so this didn't just rise out of the ground in a short period of time. This had been years of work , which I hadn't been around for. But they had been organizing in various communities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. But the college was not exclusive on a class basis and what people learned in college, the skills that they picked up there would be, in some ways, shaped by the needs and histories of various communities. And several of the people who had, who were in leadership had many years of prior political experience. And all of them had, at that point that I got there, years of community organizing experience. And so many people were closely connected to the Black Panther party. George Murray, who was the Minister of Education, was also on the central committee of BSU. So all these relationships were really tight. So much of what happens subsequently in the Mission, in the Fillmore and Hunters Point, and J-Town and Chinatown are shaped by all these years of prior experience that then comes, crystalizes at San Francisco State during the strike. Wanted to kind of develop a College of Ethnic Studies to bring in more students of color. People of color helped define their own curriculum. That's also, for all these people with understanding of what's happening internationally, and particularly with the war in Vietnam, it's also something that ties into the history of people of color here. The demands that we're developing are also the demands of solidarity with just, whether it's happening in Asia or Latin America or in Africa. So it was felt as a very internationalist, part of an internationalist movement.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.