A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

Tamio Wakayama

Tamio Wakayama (known as “Tom” during the movement era) is far from a typical Japanese American. In fact, he’s not Japanese American at all, but rather is a Japanese Canadian, born near Vancouver on April 3, 1941, to Issei (immigrant) parents.[7] Along with all other Japanese Canadians, the Wakayama family was expelled from the West Coast during World War II by the Canadian government.[8] Because his family was exiled from Vancouver when he was a mere infant, Wakayama’s earliest memories are of growing up in Chatham, a farming town in southwestern Ontario. The Wakayamas and a few other Japanese families settled into the only area of Chatham that they could afford: the black neighborhood. His father, who upon arrival in Canada had labored in sawmills, had scrimped and saved to become a shopkeeper in Vancouver but in Chatham could only find the gruesome work of processing the carcasses of diseased cattle.[9] Wakayama’s childhood produced a complicated sense of race. He recalls the comfort and safety of the Japanese cultural bubble created by the small Nikkei community—Oshogatsu (Japanese New Year) stands out in his memory—but also felt the sting of racism.[10] In the youth culture of Chatham, Japanese kids played and aligned with black kids on the nonwhite side of the racial divide.[11]

Wakayama was not politically active before college nor during his matriculation at University of Western Ontario. However, while home for summer 1963, he began following news of the growing civil rights movement in the United States broadcast on the Canadian television news. He was transfixed by the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in late August and was particularly drawn to the oratory on display—but it was John Lewis, not Martin Luther King Jr., who captivated him.[12] He made the fateful decision to go south with hardly any conscious thought. He remembers that the southern struggle “gripped my imagination” at a moment in which he was searching for some meaning in life, and above all else, he intuitively felt that the civil rights movement was something that he desperately needed to understand.[13] His oral history interview and his written memoir make clear that this intuition that the civil rights movement was integral to his own survival reflected an inchoate but powerful sense that it offered a way to address his own place in the racial hierarchy. He writes, “And where, I wondered, is my own rightful place in this monolithic white world and these thoughts awoke the distant hope that perhaps, within this black movement for freedom, I could locate the matrix of my own liberation.”[14]

With no real plan, no contacts, and no set destination, he loaded up his trusty Volkswagen Beetle, hugged his mother good-bye, drove north across the bridge from Windsor to Detroit, and then headed south. By the second day of his trek, Wakayama had made it to Nashville and heard news over the radio about the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four African American girls. He immediately set off toward the troubled city. When he arrived, he got lost and wandered into a black neighborhood, where an angry crowd of youth surrounded his vehicle. When they spied a light-skinned driver behind the windshield, they began rocking his car, but Wakayama surprised them when he climbed out and proved to be not white. He mollified the crowd by expressing “outrage” at the bombing and offering “condolences” for the victims. They sent him on his way with directions to the YMCA and a warning to get there quickly, “for this was not a night to be wandering the streets of Birmingham.”[15] The centrality of this incident in Wakayama’s recollection signals his marginality in the South, light enough to arouse suspicion from blacks and yet nonwhite enough to be a potential ally. His narrative underscores the latter point: before arriving at the YMCA, he stopped at a black restaurant where he was greeted guardedly, but he broke the ice by trading a Canadian du Maurier cigarette for a Lucky Strike with the counterman. In the ensuing conversation, he learned about what it was like to be black in the Jim Crow South and, fatefully, discovered the location of headquarters of SNCC.[16]

The next morning, Wakayama arrived at the A. G. Gaston Motel, where he met John Lewis, Julian Bond, and Annie Pearl Avery, who took him under her wing. He and Avery joined eight thousand mourners at the funeral service for three of the four girls killed in the bombing, where he heard for the first time the spellbinding oratory of Dr. King. Afterward, an elderly deacon apologized for the open displays of emotion during the ceremony, which in Wakayama’s narrative triggers a related recollection: that having grown up in a black neighborhood, he was familiar with the expressiveness of black worship. He notes further that an Issei friend of his family had married a black woman and preached occasionally at a Methodist church. This aside functions to underscore Wakayama’s closeness to black culture. In contrast, he recalls humorously how disoriented his Issei mother (who was Buddhist and Shinto) had been when she visited the raucous black service.[17]

Wakayama owned a valuable resource: a working car, which granted him quick entry into SNCC circles. From Birmingham, he drove Bond, James Foreman, and photographer Danny Lyon to SNCC headquarters in Atlanta. Initially, he worked as a janitor and driver but soon graduated to working on the SNCC newspaper, the Student Voice, and was put on the SNCC payroll. His newspaper work entailed layout, and he learned how to develop film. He also developed a good eye for images and began experimenting with photography. At first he was the only Asian in SNCC, but he was joined for a time by “Brother Ed” Nakawatase, a Sansei (third-generation Japanese American) from Seabrook, New Jersey, who later joined the antiwar movement, became a socialist, worked for the American Friends Service Committee on American Indian matters, and was active in the Redress and Reparations movement.[18] But he recalls that despite being unusual, being Asian wasn’t particularly notable, for this was the period in which SNCC welcomed workers of all stripes. In the South he experienced both white racism, from a hostile police officer who called him a “Jap,” and white graciousness, from a shipping clerk who went far out of his way to rush out SNCC promotional materials because his brother had been a member of the “Lost Battalion” rescued by the famous Japanese American 442nd Regiment during World War II. But mostly he felt like an “anomaly.” During 1964, he had the opportunity to put his photographic skills to work as he toured the Mississippi backcountry during Freedom Summer with Bob Moses, whom he deems to have been his most lasting influence.[19]

Wakayama’s reflection on SNCC’s transition from beloved community to Black Power provides an invaluable index into his understandings of race, identity, and nationalism. He attended the 1964 Waveland, Mississippi, SNCC retreat, most famous for Casey Hayden and Mary King’s critique of sexism but also an occasion on which racial schisms grew more visible.[20] Wakayama recalls his ambivalence on the question of Black Power:

Shortly after Waveland, Wakayama returned home to Canada for the 1964 winter holidays. It was the end of his active work with SNCC. In a sense, he fled before the oncoming storm, for he believes that in the 1965 SNCC split, he would have been expelled, his nonblackness overriding his nonwhiteness.[22]

In the aftermath of his southern civil rights activism, Wakayama spent the next few years wandering through the Canadian New Left, participating in the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA), a Canadian analog to SDS, in which he frequently found himself to be the only person of color. He photographed First Nations reserves and the Doukhobor (a Russian minority) and traveled to Cuba. He meandered between Toronto and Vancouver and through a number of romantic relationships and experimented with 1970s-style diversions, all the while searching for his photographic muse. During this period, he experienced the growing Orientalism of the left, going from being seen as a “dirty Jap” to being regarded as some sort of Zen guru, and realized that his romantic liaisons with white women had often positioned him as an “exotic Asian morsel to be sampled in order to fuel their rebellion.”[23]

The event that precipitated Wakayama’s transformation from a stranger in someone else’s movement to a protagonist in his own came when he embarked on “a pilgrimage to the ancestral land” of Japan.[24] There, for the first time, he experienced being in the majority—a sensation he found both comforting and disquieting for its novelty. While he enjoyed looking like everyone else, Wakayama found out how distant he was from Japanese culture: he was bewildered by the complexity of social rituals, made some cultural blunders—such as emptying the furo (a soaking tub in which the water is kept hot for several days) after his bath—and studied the language assiduously. He also began studying the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute. Given that Oshogatsu was a major celebration of his community in Canada, he eagerly anticipated an elaborate celebration but was disappointed by the cursory rituals in Japan—the expected mochi pounding, soba eating, and neighborly visits were all missing. This experience made him realize that Japan had undergone radical changes over the decades, and Nikkei in Canada could rightfully claim their place as preservers of the “cultural flame.” This revelation constituted an important step in Wakayama’s journey of understanding, for as he writes, “Japan was the bridge that brought me home.” Critically, he credits the African journeys of SNCC leaders like John Lewis as inspiration for his own pilgrimage to Japan, which enabled him to find a new home in the Japanese Canadian community.[25]

Wakayama returned to Canada, living in Toronto and in assorted rural places, before settling in Vancouver. Having improved his Japanese language skills in Japan, he had begun writing letters to his mother in the simplified katakana and hiragana syllabaries but had great difficulty decoding her replies. In search of an interpreter, he visited Language Aid, an immigrant aid center, where a woman named Michiko Sakata translated his mother’s letter and, upon learning that Tamio had studied shakuhachi in Japan, directed him to a shakuhachi master in downtown Vancouver. Tamio found himself at Tonari Gumi, a drop-in center for Japanese elders, where he made a second home volunteering and hanging out. He writes, “I had just entered a world that would consume all my energy and bring closure to my life’s journey.”[26] He also continued to work on his Japanese with Michiko.

The next leg of Wakayama’s journey began when Michiko approached him in 1974 with the idea of creating an exhibition to document the history of the Nikkei in Canada. She reasoned that his expertise as a photographer would make him the perfect partner, but Tamio refused, having established a lucrative studio that took up much of his time. Despite his rejection, she persisted, until he finally agreed not only to participate but also to take on the role of director and curator. Wakayama and a crew of about twelve, evenly divided among Sansei and new immigrants, threw themselves into the task of archival and photographic research, interviewing Issei, gathering photographs from the community, creating a coherent narrative, laying out images, and writing captions. For these intrepid volunteers, creating the exhibition amounted teaching themselves and writing the history of Japanese Canadians, for they had no textbooks to draw upon. The intensity of the work drew the group together. Wakayama recalls, “Not since my time with [SNCC] had I felt such a bond with others but my ties to my brothers and sister[s] in this new coalition was stronger and more intimate for we were dealing with issues that went to the very core of our being.”[27] In other words, adding racial commonality strengthened the bonds of commitment that he had previously felt in his prior social movement communities. After two years of labor, “The Japanese Canadians, 1877–1976” opened in Vancouver. Wakayama and his coworkers took great satisfaction in seeing the reaction of elderly Issei as they viewed the exhibition: expressions of joy, excitement, and sorrow. The exhibition went on to be displayed in Ottawa at the Museum of Man and eventually was exhibited in forty venues in Canada, the United States, and Japan. Working on the exhibition immersed Wakayama totally in the Japanese community in Vancouver. He became an integral member of the Powell Street Festival organizing committee, which put on what has become an annual celebration of Nikkei history and culture held in the historic heart of Japanese Vancouver. The festival overcame political and generational rifts in the community to become a rallying point. Wakayama’s dedication to preserving and rebuilding a sense of cultural belonging in Vancouver paralleled efforts by the mainstream Asian American movement in the United States to defend affordable housing, provide cultural resources to communities, and build a sense of pride among Asian Americans in cities as far flung as Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Critically, for Wakayama, his search for his Japanese Canadian identity had begun with working with SNCC in the South. Reflecting on his personal journey from Vancouver to Ontario to the Deep South to Japan and back, Wakayama concludes, “After three decades of exile, I had found my way home.”[28]

Patti Iiyama

In contrast to Wakayama, who began his activist trajectory as a curious but apolitical naïf, Patricia “Patti” Iiyama is a classic red diaper baby, the daughter of longtime leftists Ernest and Chizu Iiyama, who trace their radicalism back to the 1930s.[29] Ernie belonged to the Oakland chapter of the Young Democrats, an organization of about ninety liberal to progressive Nisei in three chapters in Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The Young Democrats supported the labor movement and the New Deal; organized politically among Nisei and cooperated with Chinese Americans to allay anti-Asian discrimination; opposed fascism at home and abroad (including Japanese fascism); and criticized the Japanese American Citizens League, the center-right Nisei political formation.[30] He also belonged to the Communist Party (CP) before Japanese American members were unceremoniously expelled from the party at the outset of World War II.[31] Chizu Kitano met Ernie while both were incarcerated at the Topaz concentration camp in Utah, and Ernie introduced her to his political circles, which included leftists and Young Democrats like Mine Okubo and Kazu Ikeda Iijima.[32] Chizu recalls the camp and her conversations with the Young Democrats as the beginning of her political education, as she learned the history of racism and labor exploitation in the United States and connected those histories to Japanese American experiences.[33]

The Iiyamas left camp to resettle initially in Chicago, where they worked in the Chicago Resettlers’ Committee, a social service group that helped Nisei find housing and jobs. Around 1943, they moved on to New York City, where they were integral members of the Japanese American Committee for Democracy (JACD), a progressive organization that both Ernie and Chizu headed at different times. The JACD did not limit its fight to equality for Japanese Americans but instead forwarded a broad-based critique of racism writ large as antidemocratic. JACD members participated in civil rights actions demanding fair housing and voting rights for “Negroes.”[34] Patti was born in New York in 1945, ensconced in this network of progressive Japanese Americans.[35] When the Iiyamas returned to Chicago around 1948, they again immersed themselves in political activism, especially around civil rights for African Americans. Chizu recalls writing letters, picketing, and protesting for fair housing and employment in collaboration with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Urban League.[36] The family moved often, always living on the edge of the black ghetto; because Ernie’s leftist politics had resulted in him being blacklisted by employers, the family frequently found it difficult to make rent.[37] Some of Patti’s earliest memories involve going to the beach on Lake Michigan with her parents, but these were no ordinary outings. They admonished her to always keep an eye on them and be ready to run out of the water if they called her. Their caution stemmed from the fact that these outings were part of a campaign to desegregate the public beaches of Chicago, and her parents were wary of being attacked by segregationists.[38] With that kind of upbringing, it is not surprising that she went on to lead a life of activism.

The Iiyama family returned to California in 1955, settling in the predominantly white suburb of El Cerrito. Patti was but one of a handful of Japanese or Asian Americans at El Cerrito High School, where there were virtually no African Americans.[39] Perhaps surprisingly, Ernie and Chizu joined the Contra Costa chapter of JACL, an organization of which they had been critical in prior decades. Nevertheless, they became active JACL members, and Ernie eventually served as president of the local chapter. Joining JACL did not mean abandoning their progressive politics, however. Patti recalls picketing at the Woolworth store in Berkeley in support of the civil rights movement’s attempts to desegregate the chain’s facilities in the South (sometime around 1960). Furthermore, Ernie became head of the Human Rights Commission of El Cerrito.

At the age of sixteen, Patti graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961. She immediately joined the political scene on campus and was eventually arrested for her participation in the Free Speech Movement (FSM). Unsurprisingly, given her civil rights activism, Patti was drawn to the SLATE coalition for its dedication to supporting the civil rights movement. She ran for student senate as a representative of Women for Peace and a member of the SLATE and won a seat.

Patti was there on Sproul Plaza when the police took Jack Weinberg into custody for staffing the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) table and participated in the thirty-two-hour-long standoff in which students surrounded the police car holding Weinberg and refused to let it leave the plaza. Although she was politically active, she was not one of the students who stood atop of the police car to deliver an oration, because, as she recalls, she was still too shy to speak out in public at that time. During the FSM, Patti served on the executive committee and was one of the 773 students arrested for occupying Sproul Hall. When the police came to arrest protesters, she remembers going limp in order to force the police officers to drag her from the building. Though the police had begun their offensive in the middle of the night, this strategy slowed the removal of protesters so much that they were still being cleared when classes resumed in the morning. Although she was bailed out of jail almost immediately, the next summer a judge tried and convicted her of trespassing and resisting arrest. She refused probation as a matter of principle and as a “ringleader” received a sentence of thirty days in Santa Rita Jail, an experience she describes as “horrible” for the regimentation and total loss of freedom. Patti does not remember any other Asian Americans active in the FSM, certainly none as centrally involved as she was, but believes that two other Japanese Americans were arrested. All three had their pictures published in the local Japanese American community newspapers, and her own grandmother told Patti that she had shamed the family by being arrested (Grandma Kitano was only grateful that Patti bore her father’s last name of Iiyama). Patti’s takeaway from the FSM was that it is possible to change people’s minds, to educate them on issues, and to mobilize them for social change.[40]

Patti developed her belief in the efficacy of mass demonstrations during this period as a part of her work in support of civil rights. She recalls participating in one of the major demonstrations in San Francisco:

Here she offers a concise statement about organizing tactics: that mass demonstrations not only demonstrate the strength of a social movement to its opponents and targets but also build solidarity within the movement for further action.

After the conclusion of the FSM, Patti cast about for a new cause and found it in the antiwar movement. Inspired by the Vietnam teach-in in Ann Arbor, she joined the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) in Berkeley and helped organize the May 1965 teach-in, which was billed not as an antiwar event but as an educational opportunity to learn about Vietnam through lectures and debates. She found this framing valuable because it enabled antiwar activists to try to change the minds of other people. A few months after the teach-in, the VDC organized a demonstration on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley to express solidarity with the South Vietnamese people. On April 12, 1966, when the police attempted to shut down the unpermitted demonstration, about half the crowd marched on city hall, with Patti leading a contingent of about one hundred women.[42]

Iiyama was also active in organizing Stop the Draft Week, in which thousands of protesters attempting to stop buses carrying draftees from reaching the Oakland induction center clashed with police. SWP leader Fred Halstead recalls her remembering October 20, 1967, as the greatest day of her life. She said, “For a change it was the cops, not the demonstrators, who were on the run.”[43] Most importantly, Patti believed in the tactic of mass demonstrations. As more and more people hit the streets, it would become easier for ordinary citizens to shed their aversion to protest and their fears of being branded as unpatriotic. In her recollection, this was exactly the case: “I remember the first demonstrations I went to, they were very small of course, they were really really tiny. We would be lucky to have maybe a hundred people at them. And then as they grew larger, you started thinking ‘Yeah, more and more people are starting to believe like I do.’”[44] Although she was critical of the “ultraleft actions” that provoked police violence against protesters, she also later came to recognize that excessive police brutality garnered attention and sympathy for the antiwar movement—growing the demonstrations from a few thousand to ten or fifteen thousand within a week.

As with the FSM, Patti found herself to be the only Asian American within antiwar organizations. Patti opposed the war in Vietnam because she believed that the Vietnamese people were struggling for self-determination and independence from colonialism. Iiyama thought, “To my mind, to be free of colonialism, you have to have a socialist revolution,” but she understood it to be the purview of the Vietnamese people to decide what form of government they would institute, even if it was not socialism. She also recalls that the stories of Asian American veterans were filtering back to the antiwar movement in the United States—experiences such as being harassed for looking like the enemy and being called “gooks.” Patti interpreted the experiences of the vets as evidence that the war was a racial, as well as capitalist and colonialist, enterprise. In this aspect, her view was remarkably similar to the Asian American movement’s position on the war.[45]

During her VDC days, roughly 1965–67, Patti joined SDS but was alienated by what she perceived as its lack of focus, operation by consensus, and problematic gender politics. I interpret her critique of SDS’s lack of focus as impatience with the inexactitude of its political line, meaning that the organization’s loosely defined oppositional stance did not lead to ideological coherence. This criticism applied as well to SDS’s operation by consensus (rather than majority rule), which rankled Patti as an insufficiently disciplined way to run an organization. Finally, she chafed at the male chauvinism rampant within SDS. However, her opposition to sexism did not mean that she was necessarily drawn to the women’s liberation movement either. To the contrary, though she considered it good for women to organize as women, she found the women’s movement to be too subjective and objected to the use of consciousness raising as personal “therapy.”

Patti was a founding member of the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) in 1968 and organized the Black and Brown Caucus along with Eldridge Cleaver, whom she found “terrible to work with” because he was “dictatorial” and preferred “a lot of rhetorical bombast rather than debate.” However, she became disillusioned with the “washed out” politics of the PFP, which she regarded as shying away from true radicalism. Thus she formally joined Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in January 1968. She was attracted to the SWP, which she admired both for its outright socialism and for its explicit Marxism. She stipulates that in her mind, “Marxism is a method, not a Bible. . . . Marxism is a methodology, a way of looking at things, it’s a way of analyzing what is happening right now to try to figure how to go forward and what to do next.” It is valuable for showing “how you win over the vast majority of people into understanding why the basis of society right now is no good for us.” Patti was also drawn to SWP’s operating principle of democratic centralism—not, she clarifies, the “fake” democratic centralism that tended toward authoritarianism and was on display in “many of these Maoist groups,” but a democratic centralism that valued debate but moved in a unified direction once a majority was reached. To Patti, this was unlike SDS, where you did what you felt like doing, and unlike the Maoist groups, where you did not have input on actions and simply did what you were told.[46]

Today, Patti continues to view the SWP’s unbending insistence on single-issue, peaceful mass marches as a compelling tactic.[47] She argues that building a mass movement requires that children and families feel safe at events and that creating situations that incite police violence is thus counterproductive. In addition, she was and continues to be critical of Maoism, which she characterizes as a “variant of Stalinism” that is “repellent” for its cult of personality, “intolerance for differences of opinion,” “thuggery,” and “anti-intellectual” bent.[48]

Given her hostility toward Maoism, it is unsurprising that Patti was uninterested joining any of the Mao-inflected Asian American organizations that popped up around the Bay Area—groups like the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and the explicitly Maoist Asian American movement organizations Wei Min She and I Wor Kuen, which flourished in the early 1970s. She recalls, “I didn’t have a relationship with any of them until the [Third World Liberation Front] strike [at Berkeley].” She did attend a political education class of a Maoist group (not AAPA but another group that she cannot recall) but was turned off by the emphasis on memorizing selections from the “Little Red Book”—Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung—which she says discouraged people from thinking for themselves.[49]

During the 1969 Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strike at Berkeley, which called for the institutionalization of ethnic studies on campus, she found herself to be in a peculiar position due to her race and politics. She recalls that “they wouldn’t allow [her] to be a part” of TWLF because she wasn’t a member of one of the constituent organizations, which were organized by race. As mentioned previously, she was not a member of any of the Asian American organizations because of her political line. Although she attended a couple of the early meetings of the AAPA, she recalls being “basically kicked out” for her politics. She said of the first meeting, “I spoke a couple of times and they didn’t like what I had to say. I spoke saying that the meetings should more open and that we should try to open them up to as many people as possible, and we should try to get as many Asians as possible involved in making the decisions.” These statements were not well received, and when Patti returned for the second meeting, she was not welcome.[50] Though excluded from the TWLF, she did participate in the Support Committee in which she helped organize white student support and wrote and distributed leaflets.[51]

In the early 1970s, Iiyama cotaught the first Asian American studies class at the University of California, Davis, along with Frank Chin (a Chinese American writer and advocate of Asian American literature whose perspectives differed dramatically from hers) and taught a Third World women’s course at Merritt College in Oakland.[52] She also worked as a staffer in black studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, but was unable to obtain a position in Asian American studies there. When the SWP turned to industrial unionism in the late 1970s, Iiyama became an oil worker, airline baggage handler, and garment worker in far-flung places from San Diego to Houston to Alabama to New York. Her purpose in joining the working class was to educate workers about the possibilities for participatory unions, which she sees as alternatives to the labor unions that have become partners of management rather than representatives of workers. It is difficult to imagine a four-foot-eleven-inch and ninety-five-pound woman performing some of these physically grueling jobs, but it speaks to her indomitable spirit and determination. Today she describes herself as “a retired oil worker.” She continues to believe that the SWP provides a useful path toward building a just world and serves as a part-time copy editor for the SWP publisher, Pathfinder Press.

Patti Iiyama was one of a handful of Asian American activists in the New Left of the early 1960s, but a new cohort of Asian Americans arose in the power movements of the late 1960s and eventually coalesced into the Asian American movement. Yet she did not follow the trajectory of Alex Hing, who participated in Stop the Draft Week and Free Speech protests at San Francisco City College before joining the Red Guard Party and eventually the Asian American group I Wor Kuen. Nor did she move from the PFP to AAPA (one of the first and most important Asian American organizations of the period) like Yuji Ichioka, who founded the latter based on the former’s membership rosters.

What differentiated Iiyama from Asian American activists of the 1960s and 1970s? As a member of the highly disciplined SWP, Iiyama was committed to a number of approaches and ideologies that were both similar to and different from the Asian American movement’s main trends. First the similarities: Iiyama was (and continues to be) convinced that race and class are integrally interconnected. In the aftermath of the 1960s, her path converged with the one traveled by many veterans of the Asian American movement. In the early 1970s, like innumerable movement activists, she worked in the burgeoning field of ethnic studies as an instructor and staffer. When the SWP turned to industrial unionism in the late 1970s, she entered the working class. Asian American movement veterans like Steve Louie and Alex Hing also moved into industrial unionism after the end of the movement era, reflecting the stances of Maoist groups like the Revolutionary Union and League of Revolutionary Struggle, both of which contained substantial proportions of Asian American activists.

As for differences, Iiyama’s journey began prior to the rise of the Asian American movement, which was far more closely linked to the power movements of the late 1960s than to the Old Left. A red diaper baby, she was accustomed to disciplined party membership, which was certainly at odds with the freewheeling culture of many New Left organizations (at least until the era of party building began in earnest in the mid-1970s).[53] (Predictably, given the heated CP-SWP rivalry, Patti’s father Ernie reacted apoplectically upon learning that she had joined SWP.) The early Asian American movement was marked by flexibility, with activists floating easily among organizations and causes such as AAPA, antiwar coalitions, and TWLF chapters, but Iiyama’s membership in SWP anchored her in place. And when the center of Asian American radicalism coalesced in Maoist organizations, Iiyama’s SWP membership rendered her as an outsider.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a movement to obtain redress and reparations for Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II gathered considerable steam across the political spectrum of Japanese American communities. Radicals and veterans of the Asian American movement who formed the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations worked alongside members of politically mainstream groups such as the JACL. Ernie and Chizu Iiyama participated from within the JACL, an organization they had opposed before World War II, but Patti never actively took part despite being supportive of its aims. The best explanation is that among her priorities of work within the SWP, the ethnically specific grievance of redress and reparations probably did not rank highly.

Conclusion

This chapter has just begun to scratch the surface of understanding Japanese American and Asian American activism in the 1960s and 1970s outside of the Asian American movement. Its brief portraits of Tamio Wakayama and Patti Iiyama are meant to be suggestive rather than definitive, but these cases raise questions about the political trajectories and avenues available to Japanese Americans and Asian Americans in the early 1960s. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans (the three most populous Asian ethnic groups in the United States prior to 1965) were all portrayed as undesirable racial others in the early twentieth century and then subsequently had decades of racial oppression denied and whitewashed by the Cold War discourse of Asian Americans as a laudable model minority. How did progressive Asian Americans locate themselves within a racial hierarchy most often understood through the black-white binary? How did they build their own identities as racial, cultural, and political subjects? How did they reconcile their commitments to fighting racial and class inequality? And perhaps most importantly, how did they interact with the larger social movements of the early to mid-1960s? As the cases of Wakayama and Iiyama show, there is no single answer to these questions.

Steven Kiyoshi Kuromiya provides a final example of a political journey that began with participation in the civil rights movement. Like Tamio Wakayama, Ed Nakawatase, and Patti Iiyama, Kuromiya’s origins trace back to the era of incarceration and exile for Nikkei. Kuromiya was born in 1943 at the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming. A Sansei, he attended the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, where he joined SDS and led CORE-sponsored sit-ins at segregated restaurants in Maryland. He met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 and worked with King in Montgomery, where he was beaten unconscious by sheriff’s deputies while registering voters in 1965. Later he marched with King in Selma and cared for the King children after their father was assassinated in 1968. Kuromiya was also an early activist in the gay liberation movement, participating in a 1965 demonstration at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. In 1970, he spoke on behalf of gay rights at the Black Panther Party’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention and formed the Philadelphia chapter of the Gay Liberation Front. He critiqued both the racism of gay activists and the homophobia of radicals of color. During the same period as his early gay activism, Kuromiya participated in the antiwar movement, sometimes in theatrical ways. For example, at the University of Pennsylvania, he publicly announced that a dog would be napalmed and then admonished the crowd of two thousand who showed up to protest that they should be as concerned about the plight of the Vietnamese people. He was arrested in 1971 for participating in the massive antiwar demonstrations in Washington, DC. In the 1980s, Kuromiya founded several key Philadelphia AIDS organizations, including AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)/Philadelphia, and characterized health care as the “new civil rights battleground”—a label that highlighted how he saw his activist strands as interwoven. He protested against policies that prevented medications from being affordable in poor communities and advocated medical marijuana usage. Kuromiya passed away in 2000 from complications of AIDS and cancer, but his trajectory, like those I’ve discussed earlier, began with civil rights and extended to include activism around other identities.[54]

In addition to Wakayama and Iiyama, figures like Lefty Yamada, Ed Nakawatase, Ernie and Chizu Iiyama, and Steven Kiyoshi Kuromiya all richly deserve much fuller study. Widening the focus of scholarship on post–World War II Asian American progressive politics to include individuals who were active before the advent of the Asian American movement and/or operated outside of the movement is certain to lead researchers to uncover rich legacies of activism, commitment, and political evolution.