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RB: But I did want to ask, as a non-white and non-Black person in the Jim Crow South, working with SNCC, getting involved in this movement, how did people respond to you from either community and assuming that there probably weren't very many other Asians at that time?

MN: Yeah. Well, let me say that there was one other Asian at least in SNCC, his name was Tameo Wakayama, he was a Japanese Canadian. And unbeknownst to me and unbeknownst to him, we sort of came to SNCC at around the same time. He was further along in his studies than I was, he'd been going, I think, to the university in Ontario. I think he, being sort of, of the same sensibility as me, I mean, I think what he did is he had a Volkswagen beetle and just go from Canada to Birmingham after the, shortly after, maybe right around the same time as the bombing that killed the four girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. And he had quite an experience. He passed about five years ago, and he was a very dear friend. We had gotten very close, I mean, for all kinds of reasons, ethnicity being one of them. But he became, he set up a darkroom for SNCC and then later became a photographer for SNCC, and he covered much of Freedom Summer, for example, for them. He found his calling, I thought. And we became close, but we were out of touch for like twenty years, and we reconnected in the mid-'80s when I was working with the Friends Service Committee, and we had organized a staff retreat up in rural Washington state. And he came down and he came down and he had moved to Vancouver, and we stayed in touch until he died. But he was the other Japanese that I knew in SNCC. There was one other, there was a Chinese American named Carl Young, and he was from Hawaii. He became later very active in support of the Native Hawaiian movement in Hawaii. He worked in Freedom Summer, I think it might have been Clarksdale. And later, he made a connection. I saw him just by strange coincidence. I mean, I think he went with Judy Wicks from Philadelphia and Cuba, to Cuba, and then on the way back, we connected, because I had known of him but not ever met him. We stayed in touch afterwards, I mean, for some things related to my job, I was out in Hawaii and I saw him a few times. So those were the three Asian Americans, or one Asian Canadian and two Asian Americans. Kiyoshi Kuromiya, I think, later worked on voter registration, maybe in '65, and I'm sure there were others. Bill Marutani was counsel on the Loving case before the Supreme Court. So there were Asians who were involved in it, but it certainly, speaking for myself, and I suspect for Tameo, too, the movement captured our imagination, captured a lot of other things, too, but certainly that.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.