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BN: So Gidra, the final issue was, I think, April of '74. Did you have a sense that its time had run out, or what was going on towards the end of it?

JF: Yeah. I was working with other organizations who were kind of, I guess evolving in the same fashion. We were all kind of turning inward and felt like a pause in publication would be best until we worked out what our next steps would be, whether it's to continue publishing or not. And so when Gidra folded, at the time I was starting to be drawn into another... I don't want to say umbrella organization, but another group that started in New York as Worker's Viewpoint, and then it evolved into this other thing later. My involvement with them was, again, drawn in by people I knew, like Mary Uyematsu. And then Mary had finished the Ethnocommunications program, and so I was... I think I'm getting my years mixed up, though. I think I went back to school during that time to finish my senior year in the film program, and then I stayed for another year to get -- that's my dog -- to get my teacher's credential. So at the time I felt the work I was doing with -- is this getting on the sound track? [Dog barking] It is? Okay, I'll just talk. The work I was doing with the ABC Pride program and its field testing process in the public schools. I thought, gee, if I just got a teacher's credential, maybe that's a way I could kind of make a living. And yet execute, continue to execute on efforts to try and change people, because that's what were kind of trying to do with the ABC Pride program. So I thought, hey, I could just be a teacher and then kind of subvert the curriculum with the pride program and we could have all these speakers and all these grandiose ideas. So I finally became a teacher and then realized I can't really do that easily. So that's how I became a teacher. So my involvement with the paper kind of ended at that point.

That's when, when I was a teacher for two years, I think that's when I was introduced to Mary and her husband John Kao, who lived right up the street, and happened to see each other, and we started talking, and then they were telling me about what they were doing and they needed some help. Especially after five members of the organization were essentially set up and assassinated by the Klan, Klan members in Greensboro, I think. Greensboro, is that South or North Carolina? I can't remember. Anyway, it was a horrific event. But they needed help in creating a film that would follow the attorneys, I think, who were the defense attorneys, who were trying to drum up support around the country behind what happened. And so Mary was working on it, and they asked if I could get involved. And through that initial introduction, I started hanging out with some of the other people involved in that group. And one of the oddest things -- this is all post-Gidra, though. I remember standing at Boy's Market of all places, wearing a sandwich board that had kind of bullet pointed items about what had happened in Greensboro and why were there, and getting up on top of the back of a pickup truck bed and had a bullhorn and was speaking about Greensboro and the tie between what happened there and what's going to happen here. "Yeah, if you guys can show your support," and we'd pass a little number ten bean can around for donations and stuff like that. That was kind of a wild time.

[Interruption]

BN: Yeah I wondered if you could go back and talk about the story with Mary and the sandwich board and that whole thing again?

JF: Yeah, you know, I'm trying to recall what I was saying, but I distinctly remember that that morning we all gathered at Deborah -- I can't remember her last name -- but she lived down near Crenshaw and Slauson around there, and I remember she made these great hash browned potatoes for us. We met there early in the morning, and then we were talking about what we're going to be doing that day, and who was going to go where, people were going to different locations to talk about this death of the CWP 5, and what it meant to the country. And so once we get all our talking points ready, then we disperse, and we go out like two blocks away from where we were living at the time, at the Boy's Market at the corner of what is now Obama and Crenshaw, but was then Rodeo and Crenshaw. And it's like the only supermarket around for that neighborhood, so everybody has to go there if they're going to buy groceries. And we parked this pickup truck there, I donned my sandwich board with pictures of what had happened, and it was something like "avenge the death of the CWP 5." [Laughs] And so we were talking to people who would listen about what would took place, had they heard about this event, did they understand what it happened, what's the role of the government and all these other things. We had these fliers that we were handing out to people, and I remember at one point climbing up to the pickup truck, and I was just so full of myself. [Laughs] I got inspired enough to take the bullhorn and shout out, like a carnival barker, and draw people into what we were trying to tell them. But that was a perfect example of, I think, I guess, an approach that doesn't work too well to change people, but was worth trying. And so this is like, I want to say '78, '79, somewhere around there. And so the paper had folded, we had all grown up, and so we were concerned about how are we going to make a living? Some of us had even started a family, so yeah, things began to change. We couldn't afford to stay up all night and pull an all-nighter in order to produce a newspaper that sold for a quarter. So we went to do different things. I wound up getting heavily involved in a hobby that I had in Chinese martial arts. But then I went back to school, got my teacher's credential, because I thought that this was a way to make a living as well as try and change the little kids' minds at least through what I had picked up from the ABC Pride program. So I stayed in teaching for six years. Was unsuccessful in my attempt to create a little revolution here. [Laughs] And just kind of got burnt out like a lot of teachers, I think, did.

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