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VM: I was also going to ask you if you could say a little bit about Storefront because I've heard of it, but I don't really know what Storefront was doing, and I know that was also a very dynamic part of this time.
AU: Storefront, I'm trying to remember the years. '73, '74, '72, somewhere in there. Storefront was an organization, we had an actual store front in the Crenshaw neighborhood on Jefferson Boulevard near either Eighth or Ninth Street. And the goal of the group was to serve the local neighborhood and to try to encourage more unity between the Asians that lived there and the Blacks that lived there. We had different programs, youth program on Saturdays, Fridays sometimes we had films or educational entertainment, we put out a newspaper. I remember once we took the kids to a... what do you call it? What are the flowers that bloom in the spring? The poppies, we took them to see the poppies, and these were mainly African American kids that we took. I think our intentions were really good, but the organization itself was largely Asian American, mostly Japanese American, very few Blacks. And we just somehow, I don't think we were able to make the kind of bridges that we'd hoped we could make. And I don't know... well, some of it might have been due to the composition of our group being largely Asian, but also the fact that we were also pretty left-wing, very left-wing. And so I'm not really sure how the local residents responded to our message being that leftist.
VM: So was this... I mean, this sounds like a pretty big involvement for this organization, that's pretty impressive, with all the programming. Was this something that you were all doing when you were students at UCLA, or is this after?
AU: The other members, I think some were going to school, but some were out of school. I was going to grad school at the time. I was working for the study center part time and then going to grad school, and doing the Storefront and doing Asian American Student Alliance, so pretty busy. But that's before I had a kid.
VM: Wow, that's a lot. Perhaps we should move on. Brian, did you want to add anything in there, any other questions, follow up?
BN: Yeah, I have one question about the Asian American Women's class. I'm curious who the students were, I mean, demographically. Was it mostly Asian American students, was there a mixture, and how big?
AU: It was mostly Asian American students, but I don't remember how large the class was.
BN: It just struck me, you're talking about giving while male students a difficult time, if there were a lot of white male students in the class, what type of white male student would take that class? That just made me wonder.
AU: Yeah. I don't remember, I think there were maybe one or two. And I remember feeling kind of bad for them. [Laughs]
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