<Begin Segment 10>

KU: Is there anything else you want to say as we're wrapping up, kind of, your involvement in the Black community and Black liberation related or Black civil rights related issues before we go to kind of shift our focus to Little Tokyo?

MM: I think it's important, particularly because of the U.S. educational system, where we're generally not given the opportunity to learn about ourselves, but about the Black community as well, and I think it's important for all of us to have some understanding of what the Black experience has been in this country. Because when we think about the development and the growth of this country, and people might think that it was all about the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Rockefellers and Fords and all these people, and Wall Street and corporate elite and the white politicians who advanced the course of history. But it's really, we talk about the treatment of Blacks and other minority people, people of color, BIPOC, whatever the term is. That in addition to being a capitalist society where it's the rich and the poor, people versus profits. But I think the other is that the contradiction of how non-white people in this country, non-European people have been treated, mostly with indigenous people and the Black slaves. But it extends beyond that to even today. But to understand that, I think, is fundamental to being able to do whatever you do in social justice work. And I think learning about even the strategies and the approaches that people took, I think is very important for all of us who want to do good, to understand that history. And I would say the Black experience is significantly and qualitatively different from others. We don't want to compare suffering, comparing victimization, there's no quantity, quality, I mean, it's still all bad. But I think understanding the Black experience is very important.

And looking into the future, I feel that for changes in society to take place, Asian Americans and Japanese Americans cannot do that alone. We couldn't have our part in it. But I think, I cannot imagine, visualize a revolutionary or a big change taking place in society without Black people being a very critical part of it. And some Black people leading were part of the leadership of that kind of change. So whatever we do in Little Tokyo or on the UCLA campus, or we become a doctor or a teacher or become a marketing specialist, whatever we do in our lives, I think it's still very important to be curious enough to learn about the Black experience. And on that, I would say, too, that the way I got introduced to a lot of politics through the Black community, came from, first of all, reading Malcolm X's autobiography and then learning about the Panthers as I mentioned earlier, but to study the history of the South. I realized much, much later that I didn't appreciate Martin Luther King enough because I kind of jumped right into the revolutionary Black experience. But Martin Luther King is a revolutionary in his own right, and he was able to accomplish so much really in a period of thirteen years. Because he was assassinated when he was thirty-nine years old, and he led the Montgomery bus boycotts in 1955 when he was twenty-six years old. And so between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-nine, what did he do? Back then, and I think even now, there's tension between what's thought to be like a nonviolent civil rights approach as opposed to Malcolm X's more revolutionary self-defense, all of that. But I think both aspects are very important, and I think that comes up in other struggles as well. We don't have either Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, but the ideas that they represent. And to figure out, figuring out what is the right path for all of us to move forward and have an impact? I think it has to incorporate both. And this section with what I said the day before, in looking at all those things, myself, too, Asian American activists in the '60s, we got involved as students, some of them high school students, I was in college by then, college students, were young people. And I think one of the lessons, as a much older person now, I said this quote. But it's basically that, "You're never too young to lead and never too old to learn." And I think that is a very important lesson. And for some people, I think the fact that, being young is an excuse for not doing something, or that they're prevented from doing something by older people, which is often the case. But I would say to young people to give yourself permission to lead and move things forward. Try things, experiment. I mean, the social justice movement is not a science. We want it to be more organized, we want it to be more systematic, but sometimes it's not, then we move forward. And making a mistake, I think, is okay. And so I would say youth is not a detriment to taking on major issues. You don't have to be just folding papers and putting stamps on envelopes, that sort of thing.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.