00:11.140 --> 00:17.129
What do you think has sustained you in the decades
of your activism?

00:17.219 --> 00:21.739
I know people always ask me the same question,
and I don't know if I really know how to answer

00:21.739 --> 00:25.219
that.
You, but I want to ask you, I want to ask you that

00:25.219 --> 00:28.459
question.
Well, I think first, don't you feel people in

00:28.459 --> 00:33.209
the movement sustain each other because
their spirit is so contagious.

00:33.340 --> 00:36.540
And I think we all get, well, hooked.

00:37.389 --> 00:40.540
I think you're one of those people whose spirit
is contagious.

00:41.790 --> 00:45.209
Hello, how are you?

00:46.779 --> 00:52.939
Since you put me on the spot yesterday and you
asked me where it all began, and you asked me

00:52.939 --> 00:57.900
about my childhood and growing up, that I would
do the same with you today,

00:57.979 --> 01:00.779
so perhaps you could tell me how it all began.

01:08.819 --> 01:09.819
We must take

01:50.730 --> 01:51.730
20

01:58.480 --> 02:03.459
We will not stop organizing.
We will not stop demonstrating.

02:03.550 --> 02:09.429
We will not stop marching.
We will not stop agitating until Mumia Abu

02:09.429 --> 02:10.919
Jamal is free.

02:14.250 --> 02:17.889
We say free Mumia because he is innocent.

02:18.210 --> 02:24.250
We say free Mumia because he has been targeted
by the Philadelphia Police Department and the

02:24.250 --> 02:29.410
criminal justice system because of his
opposition to police crimes,

02:29.690 --> 02:32.080
police brutality, police corruption.

02:32.729 --> 02:39.600
We also say free Mumia because he is the most
eloquent opponent of the death

02:39.600 --> 02:41.529
penalty in this country.

03:03.759 --> 03:04.759
Hm.

03:19.350 --> 03:23.899
You were sort of a legend for me for a long
time before we actually saw each other.

03:25.389 --> 03:27.169
I don't think so.
No, I wasn't.

03:27.179 --> 03:28.179
I was like going to, going to all the

03:36.589 --> 03:42.830
the thing. A matter of fact, you remember the
event where we gave you an

03:42.830 --> 03:47.899
award? Did I get to sit next to you? I think
we spoke on the same,

03:48.380 --> 03:51.179
yeah, but you were the one who received the
award.

03:51.389 --> 03:54.410
You were doing organizing in Harlem. No.

03:54.669 --> 03:57.539
I didn't become political till late.

03:58.110 --> 04:02.009
I was 40 and actually I didn't.

04:02.710 --> 04:05.089
Become political till we moved to Harlem.

04:05.339 --> 04:09.779
Well, we were lucky we heard that this project
was opening up and there were two criteria.

04:09.899 --> 04:14.529
First, income wise you had to fit in.
You had to be low income,

04:14.860 --> 04:21.019
and secondly, somebody in the family had to
have a job within a 10 block radius of the

04:21.019 --> 04:27.380
project, and just by sheer luck, my husband, who
was working for JICA, Japan International

04:27.380 --> 04:29.059
Christian University Foundation.

04:29.750 --> 04:36.350
Whose office was on 23rd Street was suddenly
moved to 120th Street in that 10-block

04:36.350 --> 04:42.750
radius of the project in Harlem, and so we
qualified, and that

04:42.750 --> 04:48.309
changed our life because, well, we said, gee, we
better learn something about the black

04:48.309 --> 04:54.589
community, the black movement, and all, and
luckily to the place where the Harlem Parents

04:54.589 --> 04:57.769
Committee
used to meet, and which became the Harlem

04:57.769 --> 05:03.010
Freedom School was almost across the street
from where we lived in this new project called

05:03.010 --> 05:04.100
Manhattanville.

05:04.570 --> 05:09.130
I never even heard the word slavery growing up,
you know,

05:09.209 --> 05:15.049
even though you're taking social studies and
history, I don't remember anyone teaching us

05:15.049 --> 05:18.369
about that.
Why do you think you were so profoundly

05:18.369 --> 05:22.559
affected?
I knew about the South and the racism.

05:23.510 --> 05:27.670
But not one black soldier came to our USO.

05:28.130 --> 05:31.779
The USO is open to anybody, and I thought that's
strange.

05:31.989 --> 05:38.269
I never saw a black person on the street.
Yeah, yeah,

05:38.489 --> 05:41.540
so what was that like, uh, being in a strange
place?

05:41.609 --> 05:44.420
Well, at first I lived right in the.

05:45.109 --> 05:50.700
USO until I could find a place.
I lived on Main Street in Hattiesburg,

05:50.910 --> 05:55.329
Mississippi.
I never saw a black person walk down Main

05:55.329 --> 06:02.010
Street, you know, we got out of camp and then I
went to New York and my first job was

06:02.010 --> 06:03.269
chock full of nuts.

06:03.660 --> 06:07.799
And all the workers are black except for the
managers who are white,

06:08.089 --> 06:14.440
and there were two guys who said they were,
they trained at Camp Shelby and went overseas.

06:14.609 --> 06:19.440
They were lucky they got back, but I said, I
wanna ask you something and he said,

06:20.149 --> 06:24.140
Why didn't any black soldiers come to our USO?

06:24.459 --> 06:28.220
Hattiesburg was full of USO, every kind of USO.

06:28.570 --> 06:30.929
One guy, the first guy said, where were the USO?

06:31.250 --> 06:33.799
I said, most of them were on Pine Street.

06:34.209 --> 06:40.700
He said, no black soldier could walk on any
main drag in

06:40.700 --> 06:43.209
Mississippi.
And he said, you mean?

06:44.260 --> 06:50.450
You're wearing your uniform, you're training to
go overseas and you're going to go overseas,

06:51.140 --> 06:54.500
and you cannot walk in any, you know,

06:55.839 --> 06:57.980
Main Street in Mississippi.
I don't know.

06:58.059 --> 07:02.769
I didn't know about the rest of the South, but
I guess most of the South is the same.

07:04.040 --> 07:05.640
I think that.

07:07.179 --> 07:13.700
It blew my mind where I knew my life was going to go
in a different direction because I,

07:14.019 --> 07:15.950
I just couldn't believe it.

07:16.260 --> 07:21.209
You know, I think place has a lot to do. I think
so, yes,

07:21.260 --> 07:24.970
politicization, um, I actually

07:26.570 --> 07:27.920
don't remember when.

07:28.829 --> 07:32.309
My political consciousness, uh, first, I was
very young,

07:34.589 --> 07:41.149
well, actually, before that, and I think it had a
lot to do with the fact that my mother had, um, a

07:41.149 --> 07:48.000
long history of political activism. We
lived in, uh, the most segregated

07:48.000 --> 07:54.309
city in
the country, in Birmingham, Alabama, that, um, the

07:54.309 --> 08:00.950
community in which we lived, the neighborhood
where my mother and father moved

08:00.950 --> 08:05.859
when I was 2 or 3 years old, was a neighborhood
under siege.

08:06.119 --> 08:10.779
Black people who were moving into that
neighborhood were under attack both by the Ku

08:10.779 --> 08:15.950
Klux Klan and by the city government, which was
headed by Bull Connor,

08:15.989 --> 08:17.859
the infamous Bull Connor.

08:19.350 --> 08:25.989
So, I think I kind of grew up with a sense of
the urgency of engaging

08:25.989 --> 08:30.450
in political opposition, uh, because that was
the only way to live.

08:38.018 --> 08:43.609
My first involvement in organized form was when
I was about 11 or 12, but I can remember, yeah,

08:43.609 --> 08:50.609
but I can remember before that
thinking in terms of, um, change that, uh, you know,

08:50.609 --> 08:57.239
my mother used to always tell us this is not
the way things are supposed to be.

08:57.239 --> 08:59.080
Black people, of course we used the term Negroes then.

08:59.369 --> 09:01.650
Uh, are not inferior, and as a matter of
fact, all white people are not like the white

09:02.320 --> 09:07.640
people you meet here.
My mother, um, she was getting her master's in

09:07.640 --> 09:12.320
education.
So she would teach during the year,

09:12.320 --> 09:15.169
then she would go to New York to study during
the summer, beginning around the time I was

09:15.179 --> 09:21.059
5 years old, so she would take the children to
New York, and we were able to see a very

09:21.059 --> 09:25.260
different kind of arrangement, uh, which meant
that when we went back to, uh, the

09:25.260 --> 09:32.099
South, we had a sense of alternatives, that
segregation was not the

09:32.099 --> 09:38.489
eternal law.
 

09:38.489 --> 09:40.010
 

09:41.239 --> 09:46.299
It is a southern city where department stores
refuse lunch counter service to Negro students.

09:50.090 --> 09:54.890
You can never whip these bugs if you don't keep
you and them separate.

09:55.169 --> 09:56.500
I found that out in Birmingham.

09:57.469 --> 10:02.830
You've got to keep the white and the black
separate to know that you aren't in some

10:02.830 --> 10:05.940
mud hole trying to fight for something, and
nobody else gets it down.

10:06.289 --> 10:09.739
But that every—that your fellow, your fellow
Negroes are with you,

10:10.049 --> 10:13.549
and that means an awful lot. Anyone is fighting
for something, for an idea.

10:15.580 --> 10:18.270
So I always say that I think I was kind of, you
know, we,

10:18.349 --> 10:22.109
I grew into my political activism. It was a
very

10:22.890 --> 10:24.169
It was no big deal.

10:24.659 --> 10:27.929
I mean, this is just sort of the way I felt I
had to be in the world.

10:28.419 --> 10:32.330
I would like to hear everything about your
beginning.

10:34.070 --> 10:39.549
And how, yeah, I mean, start with what schools
you went to, even when you were small,

10:39.719 --> 10:45.080
could you start?
OK, well, I mean, it's interesting because, uh, my

10:45.080 --> 10:48.280
mother just passed. Uh, I'm sorry.

10:48.520 --> 10:54.119
So I've been thinking a lot, and we've been
talking a lot about our early childhood

10:54.119 --> 10:57.309
memories in Birmingham.
Was her name Davis?

10:57.880 --> 10:59.859
Sally, Sally Davis.

11:00.630 --> 11:07.440
And I think I got a lot of my activism from her
because she was involved in

11:07.440 --> 11:14.380
the campaign to free the Scottsboro 90, really
from way back, from way back. She was an

11:14.380 --> 11:20.580
activist, uh, just after she started college,
um, she was involved in the Southern Negro

11:20.580 --> 11:25.849
Youth Congress and supporting, uh, labor
struggles there.

11:26.799 --> 11:30.070
Um, she was a communist back then.

11:30.479 --> 11:37.340
Well, she never joined the party, but she was
friends with, uh, a lot of the

11:37.890 --> 11:40.210
uh, black communists who had come to you.

11:44.270 --> 11:45.479
Well, yeah, sort of. There's a connection.

11:45.729 --> 11:51.250
My mother was involved in all of those, um,
struggles in the late 20s,

11:51.289 --> 11:56.919
the early 30s, involved in the NAACP as well.
So in the South.

11:57.409 --> 12:00.729
If you were a member of an organization like
the NAACP,

12:00.799 --> 12:07.789
it was assumed that you were communist, right,
even though NAACP was a lot milder,

12:08.440 --> 12:15.239
but it takes so much more courage, you know,
when I think the, uh, the US government

12:15.239 --> 12:19.799
made communism almost something criminal.

12:20.200 --> 12:24.000
Yeah, look what happened to, what's his name?
Robert Williams.

12:24.039 --> 12:26.599
That's, yes, exactly, exactly, in North Carolina.

12:26.950 --> 12:31.179
I never really made the connection between my
activism and her activism,

12:31.270 --> 12:37.219
but obviously the seeds were planted, you know,
uh,

12:37.750 --> 12:43.020
she continued to do activist work and when, uh,
my sister,

12:43.039 --> 12:46.669
who was one of the majorania was one of the
major.

12:47.200 --> 12:52.760
Um, figures in the campaign, she got pregnant
and had her baby.

12:53.479 --> 13:00.130
While I was in jail, yeah, she gave the
baby to my mother.

13:00.130 --> 13:04.010
She continued to travel all over the world.

13:05.380 --> 13:09.059
I was in jail.
She was traveling on my behalf and then my

13:09.059 --> 13:15.820
mother was traveling with the baby, so that was,
uh, three generations of

13:15.820 --> 13:17.460
activism right there, yeah.

13:24.710 --> 13:26.520
I was the only one home.

13:26.809 --> 13:30.869
My brothers and my mother were elsewhere, and I
was so surprised.

13:30.890 --> 13:34.890
My father had just come back from the hospital
the day before.

13:34.929 --> 13:36.760
He had surgery.

13:37.000 --> 13:41.840
It was, I don't know, around 11 o'clock in the
morning, Sunday it was.

13:42.289 --> 13:48.369
Uh, these, I didn't know who they were, but as
soon as they knocked on the door and I opened

13:48.369 --> 13:52.890
the door, they showed me their, I don't know, ID
to prove who they were.

13:53.799 --> 13:59.640
From the FBI, and then he asked where my father
was, and I said,

13:59.750 --> 14:04.919
well, he's sleeping, he's not feeling well, but
they just went in and told him to put on his

14:04.919 --> 14:07.830
slippers and bathrobe, and they took him out.

14:08.039 --> 14:11.830
And then I called my mother and said, come home
right away.

14:12.150 --> 14:14.510
Three people just took Pop somewhere.

14:15.119 --> 14:19.070
We didn't know where.
That was December 7, 1941.

14:20.390 --> 14:22.380
By that evening,

14:23.039 --> 14:29.750
I mean, it was in all the newspapers' headlines:
Pearl Harbor bomb and all.

14:29.750 --> 14:34.619
So all of us Japanese Americans were
calling up each other.

14:35.349 --> 14:41.260
Did the FBI come yet to your place and all
that, and I wonder what's gonna happen to us.

14:41.859 --> 14:45.789
Because the feeling on the west coast was very,
very

14:46.830 --> 14:48.000
What's the right word?

14:48.250 --> 14:54.950
Um, yeah, yeah, a lot of fear and hate and

14:54.950 --> 14:58.419
all.
Do you know why they specifically targeted your

14:58.419 --> 15:04.169
father?
Since he supplied fish to Japanese ship plants.

15:05.359 --> 15:11.030
Um, he used to also meet all of these captains,
and he would take them

15:11.390 --> 15:15.750
to a golf course, but FBI said.

15:16.309 --> 15:23.299
He was taking them on highways where there were
military installations.

15:23.469 --> 15:29.869
There were no military installations then, and he
was just taking them to the golf courses.

15:30.229 --> 15:33.979
Because they just needed someone or they
couldn't speak English,

15:34.030 --> 15:39.380
they needed just a Japanese-speaking person who
would be like a chauffeur.

15:40.280 --> 15:45.880
But they said they had been watching him for 20
years in this small town,

15:45.960 --> 15:51.739
I mean, and he was the first one in our town.
There weren't many Japanese in our town who

15:51.739 --> 15:56.059
They were picked up right away.
They were picked up a little later because

15:56.059 --> 15:59.429
eventually all fishermen were picked up.

16:11.010 --> 16:17.679
Yeah, everything happened

16:17.679 --> 16:23.789
fast after that.
I mean, my father died six weeks later.

16:24.280 --> 16:30.200
It was January 21st, and then by April 1st, the
word was out that

16:31.039 --> 16:36.190
all people of Japanese background would be
uprooted and evacuated.

16:36.549 --> 16:41.109
Lands that had never been occupied or farmed
were chosen for most of the relocation centers.

16:41.679 --> 16:47.010
These were in unsettled parts of California, Arizona, Utah,
Idaho, Wyoming,

16:47.320 --> 16:49.270
Colorado, and Arkansas.

16:49.559 --> 16:54.200
Most of the land was covered with desert growth
or timber in the case of Arkansas

16:54.200 --> 16:58.000
centers.
Their evacuation did not imply individual

16:58.000 --> 17:01.619
disloyalty.
Two-thirds of the evacuees were American citizens by

17:01.619 --> 17:02.690
right of birth.

17:03.020 --> 17:06.609
The rest were their Japanese-born parents and
grandparents.

17:07.060 --> 17:12.020
They were guarded by military police, symbols of
the military nature of the evacuation.

17:12.300 --> 17:14.510
We call them concentration camps.
They were,

17:14.739 --> 17:20.260
you know, they were called internment camps and
everybody was taken.

17:20.859 --> 17:26.849
They told us we could not take anything that could
be used as a weapon,

17:27.260 --> 17:33.619
so we could take spoons, but I don't think we
could take forks or knives.

17:33.739 --> 17:38.890
We had no idea whether it was only going to be for a
couple of weeks,

17:39.140 --> 17:43.729
and they would let us come back, or if it might be a
couple of years,

17:44.180 --> 17:47.810
and at first we all went into an assembly center.

17:48.510 --> 17:55.060
We stayed for about seven months until the camps were built,
and by October,

17:55.349 --> 18:01.469
all of us were in what they called internment
camps, but all Japanese Americans called them

18:01.469 --> 18:02.540
concentration camps.

18:02.869 --> 18:05.949
Of course, they were nothing like the ones that
the Jews went into,

18:06.150 --> 18:09.260
but we felt the Jews were sent to death camps.

18:11.750 --> 18:14.329
And your family went to Arkansas, right?

18:15.140 --> 18:19.160
What was it like living in the camps at that
time?

18:19.619 --> 18:25.250
Well, you know, we all lived in barracks, and we
all ate in a mess hall,

18:25.260 --> 18:29.239
and then they had what they called black houses
where men and women,

18:29.339 --> 18:34.880
what do you call it, also where we could take
baths and, uh,

18:35.010 --> 18:37.550
they called them black houses.
Yeah, I don't know why,

18:38.040 --> 18:45.000
because it was nothing but, well, because the
buildings were black tar paper

18:45.000 --> 18:46.050
or I don't know what.

18:47.199 --> 18:50.270
And so, but the one thing they said.

18:50.780 --> 18:57.459
Everybody under 18 has to register for school.
Anybody over 18 has

18:57.459 --> 19:02.930
to choose some kind of work.
Well, I picked nursing. How old were you then?

19:03.209 --> 19:09.300
20, and I really enjoyed doing that kind of work.
I think

19:09.780 --> 19:16.609
I would have wanted to go to nursing school. I
thought, for the duration of the war,

19:17.229 --> 19:21.219
Japanese Americans were in camp, but the last
year we were in there.

19:21.609 --> 19:28.410
The US government said if any Japanese American
could get a job,

19:28.500 --> 19:34.099
they could not go to the West Coast, but they
could go anywhere in Mid-America and get a job

19:34.099 --> 19:35.650
if they would be hired.

19:36.130 --> 19:42.650
So where did you go when you left the camp? In
camp I met a guy I fell in love with.

19:43.339 --> 19:50.140
I wanted to get married very much, and I thought
everything was set, and just before the—The

19:50.140 --> 19:54.189
442 left for overseas, you know, for Europe.

19:54.599 --> 19:58.839
My mother got a permit to be at the wedding
and stuff.

19:59.859 --> 20:05.420
And then just as we were getting married, the
chaplain

20:06.109 --> 20:10.859
he says, I just received a telegram and he said,
I'm sorry,

20:10.939 --> 20:17.170
but Bill's father said, I can never permit this.
I don't even know who she is.

20:17.699 --> 20:23.420
And I was just so shocked and hurt, and then the
chaplain said,

20:23.500 --> 20:25.770
look, all the women.

20:26.439 --> 20:32.810
The wives who were here with their husbands,
they're all going back to camp or wherever

20:32.810 --> 20:35.969
they're gonna go back to. When she said that,

20:36.699 --> 20:41.359
we don't have anyone to run the USO, the
Japanese American USO,

20:41.660 --> 20:47.680
so I stayed there for a year and a half after
all the guys left,

20:47.699 --> 20:53.739
then all their wives went back to camp.
I didn't want to go back to camp.

20:53.880 --> 20:56.469
I got a job, I think, in Minnesota.

20:56.829 --> 21:00.109
Were you with your husband Bill Finn, or was
you?

21:00.260 --> 21:04.180
Well, he went overseas; he was still overseas,
so you went back.

21:04.329 --> 21:10.569
To Minnesota, yeah, and then when the war
finally was over,

21:10.819 --> 21:16.979
well, I was back in my hometown with my mother
and my older brother who didn't get in the army.

21:16.979 --> 21:18.469
Moved back to San Pedro.

21:19.939 --> 21:23.079
And it was so strange going back.
People were asking,

21:23.319 --> 21:24.510
where did you go?

21:24.839 --> 21:30.099
What I mean, so they were totally unaware,
unaware they said,

21:30.119 --> 21:36.550
yeah, so what did you do during the war?
I said no Japanese American could live here.

21:37.079 --> 21:43.319
And I guess they didn't know. You know, we're
taught about what is it freedom,

21:43.479 --> 21:44.750
justice, and what.

21:46.650 --> 21:49.500
Freedom, equality, or something like that, and I always
believed it.

21:53.880 --> 21:56.349
And what a great country this was.

21:57.250 --> 22:03.250
And then I started thinking, wait a minute,
well, I started to see

22:03.579 --> 22:06.859
America quite, quite differently.

22:08.030 --> 22:14.790
My mother and father bought a house, their first,
well, their first house; it was their only house.

22:14.790 --> 22:21.140
We still own the house now, uh, and it was in a
neighborhood that was

22:21.270 --> 22:24.949
uh, right on the edge of a

22:25.900 --> 22:30.449
neighborhood zone for white people only, so
where we lived,

22:30.540 --> 22:34.170
uh, black people were allowed to live on one
side of the street,

22:35.020 --> 22:42.020
but we were not allowed to live or even walk on
the other side of the street, so

22:42.459 --> 22:47.930
you know, growing up under those circumstances
uh made us really aware of,

22:47.939 --> 22:50.089
you know, the meaning of segregation.

22:50.619 --> 22:52.819
My earliest involvement

22:54.189 --> 22:57.400
was when I was 11 years old and I became what
was, it was, um,

23:02.030 --> 23:06.000
we, we formed an interracial discussion group
for, uh, young

23:06.130 --> 23:11.310
you know, for kids, the children's interracial
discussion group in the South,

23:11.319 --> 23:16.780
yes, yes, and we met at, uh, my mother's church,
our church,

23:16.880 --> 23:20.969
uh.
The same church where we're having her memorial.

23:20.969 --> 23:27.810
And as a result of, uh, our meetings, they burned
the church; they burned a portion of the church.

23:28.060 --> 23:29.260
Oh my God, yeah, so

23:31.010 --> 23:34.180
So I guess you might say it was baptism by fire.

23:34.430 --> 23:36.000
Wow, geez.

23:36.750 --> 23:40.650
What part of Alabama, Birmingham?
Oh, Birmingham,

23:40.750 --> 23:44.229
right.
I know in my autobiography I described the fact

23:44.229 --> 23:50.619
that, uh, some of my earliest memories are
the sounds of bombs going off.

23:50.869 --> 23:56.069
Whenever black people would try to buy
one of the houses across the street,

23:56.540 --> 24:02.640
uh, the Ku Klux Klan would, uh, come and either
burn the house or bomb the house,

24:03.250 --> 24:09.609
and, and at that time the city government was
run by Bull Connor. And you remember Bull Connor,

24:09.650 --> 24:12.969
right?
So Bull Connor would get on the radio and would

24:12.969 --> 24:17.410
say something like they would use the, you know,
the other word moved in on.

24:17.979 --> 24:23.819
Uh, on Center Street, and there will be
bloodshed tonight or something like that, and

24:23.819 --> 24:30.540
sure enough the bomb would go off, and yeah, yeah,
so, so I think

24:30.540 --> 24:37.209
that growing up under those conditions and
having my mother and father explain to us

24:37.579 --> 24:41.699
what was going on, but also having them, um,

24:42.359 --> 24:47.189
emphasize to us over and over again that this
was not the way things were supposed to be.

24:47.719 --> 24:51.609
Uh, that they could change, that wasn't the
church that the four,

24:52.160 --> 24:58.239
No, no, the church I'm referring to is
the First Congregational Church and the four girls

24:58.239 --> 25:04.189
were killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church,
which right now is right across the street

25:04.550 --> 25:06.989
from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

25:08.040 --> 25:08.060
the song

25:16.369 --> 25:20.609
that. But I also remember the Montgomery.
 

25:21.939 --> 25:25.189
That's right, the Montgomery bus boycott, which
so you were there too,

25:25.260 --> 25:29.739
I guess, yeah, I was. In 1955 I was still
in Birmingham.

25:30.359 --> 25:36.650
I left in 1959 to go to high school in New York.

25:37.050 --> 25:39.199
What high school?
I never knew that.

25:39.250 --> 25:43.069
Yeah, this was a school in
Greenwich Village.

25:50.040 --> 25:53.479
I went on an exchange program that was,

25:54.270 --> 25:58.550
established by the American Friends Service
Committee, the Quakers.

25:58.800 --> 26:05.270
I lived with a family in Brooklyn in Bedford
Stuyvesant.

26:06.020 --> 26:11.579
And the man was a minister, Reverend
William Howard Mellish.

26:13.670 --> 26:15.060
He is black or white?
He was white.

26:16.270 --> 26:17.859
He and his father.

26:18.369 --> 26:23.630
Were ministers at the largest Episcopalian
church in the area.

26:23.640 --> 26:30.150
It was in Brooklyn Heights, and because they
were active in the Soviet-American

26:30.150 --> 26:37.109
Friendship Society, the diocese took the church
from them because when I

26:37.109 --> 26:43.770
arrived in '59, the church had been completely
shut down and they were doing

26:43.770 --> 26:46.310
services in other places.

26:46.890 --> 26:50.640
So they were the target of quite a bit of
anti-communism.

26:50.770 --> 26:55.160
I lived with that family and went to high
school, in the village.

26:55.280 --> 26:56.560
 

26:57.689 --> 27:01.770
Yes, it's interesting, isn't it, that we both
have all of these connections with New York.

27:01.849 --> 27:04.719
Of course, you spent many more years in New
York than I did.

27:04.810 --> 27:11.800
But I was there during some of the
years you spoke about in the late 50s,

27:11.810 --> 27:15.689
early 60s, and I was also there in 1970.

27:16.010 --> 27:22.989
In August of 1970, I was arrested in New
York and I was taken to the

27:22.989 --> 27:28.839
Women's House of Detention, which at that time
was located in the heart of Greenwich Village.

27:28.839 --> 27:34.550
Uh-huh, so you had asked me who else was,
arrested

27:34.560 --> 27:36.630
and taken to that jail.

27:36.920 --> 27:41.959
I know the New York 21, you're
remember the case of the New York 21, and Afeni

27:41.959 --> 27:48.430
Shay was in that jail, not when I was there,
but I knew that she had,

27:48.530 --> 27:54.989
Uh, been there, and that's where Billie Holiday
was taken when she was arrested.

27:55.560 --> 27:57.400
Before they took her to Alderson.

27:58.189 --> 28:04.800
Because Billie Holiday was in Alderson at the
same time that Lolita Lebron was in Alderson.

28:04.800 --> 28:08.459
And perhaps when you were writing to Lolita
Lebron, uh,

28:08.469 --> 28:14.989
and also, so there are a lot of, you know, very
interesting connections, and speaking of Billie

28:14.989 --> 28:17.739
Holiday,
did you know?

28:17.800 --> 28:20.329
No, I never met her.
I love her music.

28:20.459 --> 28:27.250
I, I, I absolutely adore her, but I did go
to high school

28:27.579 --> 28:33.130
with the children of, um, Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg.

28:33.579 --> 28:39.010
Really?
And they were adopted by a man whose name was a

28:39.010 --> 28:44.619
Mirpool, and he was the one who wrote Strange
Fruit.

28:45.319 --> 28:51.079
Which was performed by Billie Holiday, so
there are all of these really amazing, uh,

28:51.079 --> 28:54.390
connections that one would never imagine.

28:55.989 --> 28:59.920
So how did you and your husband Bill decide to
move to Harlem?

29:00.670 --> 29:07.290
New York put a lot of money to build housing
for the soldiers who were

29:07.569 --> 29:12.010
coming back.
One project after another came up.

29:12.209 --> 29:16.660
First we got into the one in Midtown.
We had six kids then,

29:16.930 --> 29:20.339
and we heard there was one opening in Harlem.

29:20.569 --> 29:26.859
And so you could imagine the thousands of
people who signed up for the one in Harlem.

29:27.589 --> 29:34.479
And I think because the housing department
didn't want that house to become

29:34.479 --> 29:39.599
suddenly just all black, we got into the Harlem
one.

29:41.180 --> 29:46.810
I was so happy.
I mean, here I am in Harlem, and then of course

29:46.810 --> 29:53.729
by then Malcolm X was famous, and you know, with
the hopes I wonder if I'll ever get to meet.

29:53.849 --> 29:59.170
Oh, you actually wondered whether you would
actually, so this is the early 60s we're

29:59.170 --> 30:05.540
talking about.
Yeah, 1960, 1961, yeah, uh-huh, and we lived

30:05.540 --> 30:12.300
in Manhattanville, which is on 126th and
Broadway, and it goes to

30:12.300 --> 30:17.380
Amsterdam and 131st, which is such a perfect
place that.

30:17.459 --> 30:21.609
It's not far where there's all kinds of events.

30:21.849 --> 30:27.599
Well, after hearing some of the best speakers
I've ever heard in my life.

30:27.910 --> 30:32.099
So you went to a lot of the little, the street
rallies, yeah,

30:32.290 --> 30:37.599
just the street and then went to all the
demonstration marches,

30:37.630 --> 30:43.680
and I take my little ones.
I think New York City was very,

30:43.839 --> 30:45.689
very wrapped up.

30:46.270 --> 30:53.060
In the civil rights movement in the South, you know,
when the civil rights movement first started,

30:53.060 --> 30:56.969
and you know they had those Freedom Rides, yes,

30:57.300 --> 31:02.449
and every time a group would come back, we
would hold a meeting at our place.

31:02.619 --> 31:03.939
Who came to the meetings?

31:04.459 --> 31:09.260
Just neighborhood people.
I mean, it was eye-opening to most of us who

31:09.260 --> 31:12.250
had no idea what blacks had gone through.

31:12.729 --> 31:19.729
In the 1960s, one of the biggest things in
Harlem was the fight for

31:19.729 --> 31:23.489
jobs for black and Puerto Ricans in
construction work.

31:23.729 --> 31:26.770
There were so many construction projects going on.

31:27.479 --> 31:29.569
They were hiring only whites.

31:30.099 --> 31:31.579
Then every day.

31:32.199 --> 31:39.189
During the summer of '63, hundreds of people
went to Brooklyn where they were building

31:39.189 --> 31:42.790
what I think was a hospital,
Brooklyn Hospital.

31:43.560 --> 31:49.939
And all these people would go there to stop the
trucks so they couldn't build that

31:49.939 --> 31:56.780
hospital and they still wouldn't hire blacks or
Puerto Ricans. By September, about

31:57.219 --> 32:02.829
700 people were arrested, many were arrested 4
and 5 times because we,

32:02.859 --> 32:05.410
you know, ran out of people eventually.

32:06.040 --> 32:08.800
And then, so you participated in the
demonstrations?

32:08.869 --> 32:10.229
Oh yeah, uh-huh.

32:10.550 --> 32:16.170
I was involved in the Harlem women's group
headed by May Mallory.

32:17.270 --> 32:21.339
Did you know her?
She was a wonderful woman.

32:21.630 --> 32:27.869
She lived in a project right near the project
we lived in. May Mallory's group and Fight Back

32:27.869 --> 32:30.150
worked together quite a bit.

32:31.030 --> 32:34.739
I want to talk to black people across this
country.

32:35.550 --> 32:37.739
There are four things we have to do.

32:38.829 --> 32:43.030
Number one, we have to stop being ashamed of
being black.

32:43.760 --> 32:50.630
Number two, we have to move into a position where we
can define terms for what we want them to be,

32:50.839 --> 32:54.069
not what racist white society wants them to be.

32:54.359 --> 33:00.680
We have to move to a position where we can feel
strength and unity amongst each other from what

33:00.680 --> 33:03.310
to Harlem where we won't ever be afraid.

33:05.359 --> 33:11.130
And the last thing we have to do is to build a
power base so strong in this country that will

33:11.130 --> 33:13.729
bring them to their knees every time they mess
with us.

33:15.750 --> 33:22.430
So we were also talking about some of our
mutual friendships and acquaintances

33:22.430 --> 33:26.530
within the movement, and you asked me about
Stokely Carmichael,

33:26.670 --> 33:28.380
uh, Kwame Ture.

33:29.069 --> 33:33.540
He was my introduction to the movement in Los
Angeles.

33:33.709 --> 33:39.050
I had been involved with the anti-Vietnam War
movement in Frankfurt.

33:39.109 --> 33:42.310
I was involved in a socialist student
organization.

33:42.709 --> 33:46.479
And, of course, the Black Panther Party had just
been founded in 1966.

33:46.550 --> 33:50.699
This was 1967, all kinds of things were
happening, but I,

33:50.949 --> 33:56.510
I had no entrance into the movement and this is
how I ended up getting involved.

33:57.040 --> 34:02.030
Uh, the organization which we call Los Angeles
SNNC, it's a Student Nonviolent Coordinating

34:02.030 --> 34:07.469
Committee, but SNCC not in the South but in Los
Angeles, LA SC,

34:07.560 --> 34:14.379
and that was how I met James Forman because, of
course, James Forman was one of the major

34:14.379 --> 34:20.810
figures in SNCC, of course Stokely, and then I
met Rat Brown,

34:20.919 --> 34:26.550
uh, then.
But these were people who, um, some of whom had

34:26.550 --> 34:33.149
actually gone to the South but others, uh, who
wanted to build a movement

34:33.510 --> 34:40.010
that would attract young people, uh, in
California, sort of not

34:40.010 --> 34:44.350
exactly a civil rights movement but a movement
for justice,

34:44.360 --> 34:46.629
equality, for a liberation movement.

35:36.620 --> 35:38.919
So how did you get involved with Max Stanford?

35:39.459 --> 35:45.459
Oh yeah.
Well, Max Stanford loved one of the guys that

35:45.459 --> 35:47.469
my daughter was in love with.

35:48.060 --> 35:52.100
Do you know a guy named Akamal Duncan?

35:53.399 --> 35:58.790
Max, yeah, Max Stanford named Akamal to be head
of the,

35:59.120 --> 36:05.750
you know, the junior group, what was it called?
RAM had a Revolutionary Action Movement,

36:06.040 --> 36:12.459
yeah, but there was a junior group of RAM and
Max Stanford asked

36:12.459 --> 36:14.080
Akamal to head it.

36:15.090 --> 36:21.389
Hundreds and hundreds of people immediately
started to join, living in Harlem.

36:21.709 --> 36:27.709
You get to learn little this and that about
black life that I don't think we would have

36:27.709 --> 36:32.629
known if we were just living, you know, with a
lot of Japanese.

36:32.814 --> 36:37.084
Americans are a mixed group.
What drew you to radical activism? Because,

36:37.175 --> 36:43.344
uh, an organization like the Revolutionary
Action Movement was considered really radical.

36:44.534 --> 36:50.725
So, what, what do you think drew you to, uh, you
know, revolutionary forms of activism?

36:51.239 --> 36:54.590
You know, RAM started before Panthers.

36:54.919 --> 37:00.469
That's right, a few years before, because the
Panthers were founded in 1966,

37:00.560 --> 37:07.320
right, and RAM was, I think, '61, and Max
Stanford was a close friend of our

37:07.320 --> 37:12.729
family anyway, and then my daughter Au, who,
who's gone now,

37:12.879 --> 37:18.669
what she and Akamal were tight, and so we.

37:19.139 --> 37:25.179
Uh, the big difference between RAM and Panthers
is that Panthers,

37:25.260 --> 37:28.659
you know, it was an open group, you know,
community group.

37:29.270 --> 37:31.830
RAM was underground.

37:33.290 --> 37:35.429
So most people never heard about it.

37:36.280 --> 37:42.899
RAM, but I'm so glad we had some connections
there.

37:43.110 --> 37:49.979
And the more I learned about Black's history,
and then on my own reading

37:49.979 --> 37:55.840
about slavery, which is certainly the most
inhumane thing that happened,

37:56.229 --> 37:59.239
and I took a class with Harold Cruz.

37:59.800 --> 38:06.179
Oh, you did, yes.
So Harold Cruz, and you know that his book,

38:06.189 --> 38:08.729
what was it?
Uh, The Crisis of the Negro Intellect.

38:09.389 --> 38:13.620
I mean, a lot of Black studies, if they were
headed still by white,

38:14.070 --> 38:16.790
they wouldn't let the students read that book.
That's true.

38:17.030 --> 38:19.870
That's true.
So where was he teaching when you took the

38:19.870 --> 38:24.300
course?
Baraka had started the Black Arts Movement.

38:24.310 --> 38:28.889
Yes, it became like the biggest thing in Harlem.

38:29.399 --> 38:35.439
And the person he chose to teach Black history
was Harold Cruz.

38:35.649 --> 38:39.290
We want freedom.
By any means necessary.

38:39.729 --> 38:44.459
We want justice by any means necessary.
We want equality by any means necessary.

38:44.610 --> 38:48.610
100 years ago they used to put on a white sheet
and use a bloodhound against Negroes.

38:48.889 --> 38:51.689
Today they have taken off the white sheet and
put on police uniforms.

38:51.810 --> 38:56.020
They've traded in the bloodhounds for police
dogs, and they're still doing the same thing.

38:56.090 --> 38:58.830
Any kind of rights that you can think of when
it comes to defending himself,

38:59.250 --> 39:02.080
Black people should have, we should have the
right to defend ourselves also.

39:04.600 --> 39:08.070
I think Malcolm would want you to have this.

39:09.729 --> 39:15.800
Only I think five people or maybe six have it,
it's amazing.

39:18.580 --> 39:20.570
Um, he says, um.

39:21.860 --> 39:28.379
The late Doctor W.E.B. Du Bois had the full
backing of the Nkrumah government, and laying the

39:28.379 --> 39:31.830
foundation for the monumental Encyclopedia
Africana.

39:32.770 --> 39:33.770
It's very interesting.

39:48.810 --> 39:49.010
Did you meet, I met Malcolm?
I met Malcolm.

39:49.020 --> 39:49.159
What was that?
It was at Brandeis, when he,

39:49.169 --> 39:49.419
when he went to you were there. Yeah.
Did you go up there and talk?

39:49.439 --> 39:53.560
I did.
Um, and it was an especially important moment

39:53.560 --> 40:00.360
for me because at that time, um, there were
very few Black people at

40:00.360 --> 40:03.939
Brandeis.
Maybe about five or six.

40:04.179 --> 40:08.169
Did he mention anything about that? I didn't see many
black people.

40:08.340 --> 40:11.129
I'm glad you're here.
Yeah, well, yeah, he did

40:11.939 --> 40:15.459
he did acknowledge me, which made me
feel very special

40:15.939 --> 40:21.050
which was very important at that time, given
the fact that

40:21.060 --> 40:25.030
there
weren't a great deal of political

40:25.030 --> 40:30.229
movements on the campus at that time, and I
felt very much alone

40:30.310 --> 40:36.469
so Malcolm's visit marked a really important
moment in the development of my own

40:36.949 --> 40:38.189
political consciousness.

41:33.080 --> 41:37.840
Why don't we talk a little bit about your
relationship with Malcolm? Because I've never

41:37.840 --> 41:43.959
heard you talk about it, although I've
heard a lot about the work that you did with

41:43.959 --> 41:46.959
Malcolm.
Maybe I'd like to talk about the time that he

41:46.959 --> 41:52.870
came over to meet the Hiroshima Nagasaki World
Peace Study mission members.

41:53.320 --> 41:59.239
They were all hibakusha, or atomic bomb victims, and
three of them were writers,

41:59.520 --> 42:02.639
and they said they wanted to meet Malcolm more
than anyone else.

42:03.550 --> 42:09.899
People in the US, so we made the effort to
try to get him over for a

42:09.899 --> 42:13.840
reception.
We didn't know until the very last minute when the

42:13.840 --> 42:18.729
reception had already begun, there was a rap on the door
and there he was,

42:19.219 --> 42:23.489
and we really thank him because it was a very
dangerous period.

42:23.540 --> 42:27.139
It was just a few months after he bolted from
the Nation.

42:28.000 --> 42:32.639
And there were so many rumors that
he might be killed, and we didn't know,

42:32.760 --> 42:38.550
we didn't know who might be the ones to do it—
whether it would be the police, FBI, or, you

42:38.550 --> 42:45.229
know, people from the Nation of Islam or who,
but he did come because he said he wanted to

42:45.229 --> 42:50.600
meet the hibakusha, and it was at our apartment
in Harlem,

42:50.750 --> 42:54.419
you know, to think that he would come and meet
these people.

42:54.649 --> 42:57.949
I thought it was really wonderful.
And so, what was it like?

42:58.120 --> 43:04.310
Oh, it's too bad we didn't even think of taping
him. There was only one professional

43:04.310 --> 43:08.310
photographer.
It took 30 years to locate him.

43:08.560 --> 43:12.790
His name was Edruck, and we finally got
photographs of

43:12.969 --> 43:18.199
pictures he took of Malcolm in the apartment with
Japanese people sitting next to

43:18.199 --> 43:22.719
him.
Of course, at this affair, there were hardly any

43:22.719 --> 43:25.949
Asians because the Asian movement hadn't begun
yet.

43:26.250 --> 43:33.159
It was mostly black and white, like 50?ch,
and I think most people who came

43:33.159 --> 43:36.830
They were just curious to know what Malcolm was like.
I mean,

43:37.139 --> 43:42.429
was he such a hater? You know, he was demonized
so much by the press.

43:42.840 --> 43:47.600
And they were really surprised to find how
gracious he was.

43:47.770 --> 43:52.610
He shook hands. The place was packed, but
those near enough who could shake hands with

43:52.610 --> 43:58.040
him, they noticed that he was as warm to whites
as he was to blacks.

43:58.169 --> 44:01.120
He was just wonderful to everybody who was
there.

44:01.409 --> 44:02.550
And what did you think?

44:02.870 --> 44:08.800
Oh, I mean, we were in our glory to say, wow,
Malcolm X is right in our apartment.

44:09.419 --> 44:12.929
And so how did your, um, relationship with
Malcolm go? I had been writing to him for

44:18.949 --> 44:24.699
from the time I met him on October 16th of '63,
it was,

44:24.850 --> 44:29.510
it was so tremendous meeting him that from that
moment I had been writing to him.

44:29.709 --> 44:34.350
I never heard from him, but I kept writing to
him; and then when he did come over,

44:34.389 --> 44:38.500
he said,
I have been receiving your letters, he said.

44:38.500 --> 44:43.389
If I ever travel again, I will write to you,
and he certainly kept his promise.

44:43.459 --> 44:49.290
I have 11 postcards from 9 countries which I
cherish, of course.

44:49.659 --> 44:53.540
Well, first he thanked the Hibohas for coming
to Harlem.

44:54.679 --> 44:59.790
And then the two things he talked about, he, he
spoke highly of Mao.

45:00.149 --> 45:06.330
And he felt that Mao did the right thing and
well, he showed sort of favoritism to the

45:06.330 --> 45:13.020
peasants, uh, because they were feeding
that huge country; and also at that time,

45:13.060 --> 45:16.459
Mao was fighting against, well, feudalism.

45:28.370 --> 45:32.449
After I saw, um, the film

45:33.270 --> 45:36.510
by Spike Lee, I, um,

45:37.379 --> 45:43.810
I started to imagine what the film might have
been like if he had included, um,

45:45.300 --> 45:51.939
much more about Malcolm's, um, crossing borders.
Uh, and I was thinking,

45:52.020 --> 45:57.510
for example, if since he used the documentary
footage, if the photograph,

45:58.219 --> 46:02.959
uh, of his assassination with you, you know,
standing, uh,

46:03.300 --> 46:08.060
leaning over him, if that had been in the film,
it would have given people a very different

46:08.060 --> 46:09.060
idea of who.

46:10.260 --> 46:13.790
Not of who Malcolm was, but of the significance
of Malcolm.

46:13.860 --> 46:19.919
Oh yeah, because he was such an international
person. Did Malcolm talk specifically about the

46:19.919 --> 46:25.379
importance of creating cross-racial, oh yeah,
cross-cultural ties and alliances.

46:25.659 --> 46:31.699
Yeah, because one of the last things he said
was, well, this is 1964 in June.

46:31.699 --> 46:36.139
And the anti-war movement hadn't really gotten

46:36.649 --> 46:41.469
off the ground,
yet.

46:41.679 --> 46:46.560
But he said if the US does send troops to
Southeast Asia,

46:46.909 --> 46:53.399
he said progressive people should protest, and
it's too bad he didn't live long enough to see

46:53.399 --> 47:00.270
that happen, but he did say that the struggle
of Vietnam is the struggle of the third world,

47:00.520 --> 47:06.040
meaning the struggle against imperialism,
colonialism, and neocolonialism.

47:06.500 --> 47:10.469
So I mean he was the period when he was um
thinking.

47:11.409 --> 47:15.750
Very critically about the nationalist
philosophy he had espoused.

47:15.790 --> 47:22.590
He was sort of revising his whole, you know,
philosophy, you know,

47:22.689 --> 47:27.229
from black nationalism to Pan-Africanism to.

47:28.090 --> 47:31.479
revolutionary internationalism, yeah.

47:31.770 --> 47:35.290
What do you think people today are aware of?

47:36.120 --> 47:41.889
Malcolm's relationship to Asian international
issues as well as,

47:42.409 --> 47:43.489
I don't think so.

47:43.870 --> 47:49.760
And even that of him meeting with the box is
very little known in the autobiography.

47:50.620 --> 47:55.540
But no, it's not in the autobiography, but you
know there's so many things not in his

47:55.540 --> 47:57.379
autobiography and then.

47:58.090 --> 48:03.919
You know, there were 3 chapters that are
missing and one of the most important chapters

48:03.919 --> 48:09.399
they said was the one on Africa, you know, when
he went to all those progressive African

48:09.399 --> 48:12.959
countries.
Also the chapter on Sister Allah, I don't know

48:12.959 --> 48:17.879
why that's missing.
And there was a third chapter and I don't know

48:17.879 --> 48:20.810
if anyone knows who has all that manuscript.

48:21.530 --> 48:24.270
So people don't know what happened, I don't
think.

48:25.550 --> 48:30.500
Can you talk a little bit about um the day he
was assassinated?

48:31.850 --> 48:37.139
Oh, that was February 21, 1965, I think.

48:38.280 --> 48:44.290
That day when we all went into the Audubon, I
mean, people had a strange feeling that

48:44.689 --> 48:46.810
something might happen.

48:47.540 --> 48:50.790
Well, because there was a lot of rumors leading
up to it,

48:51.199 --> 48:55.679
because no one, you know, that week, no one
really knew where he was staying.

48:56.120 --> 48:59.000
He wanted to protect his own family, so he
didn't.

48:59.639 --> 49:05.280
I don't even know if his own family knew the
fact that not one of the people that was

49:05.280 --> 49:09.870
invited to speak on the podium with him, that
none of them showed up.

49:10.199 --> 49:14.290
I mean, I think his cadre thought that's
strange.

49:14.399 --> 49:17.070
Are they afraid to come today and why?

49:17.840 --> 49:23.729
But to dispel that kind of fear, you know, he
told his guards not to even,

49:23.760 --> 49:28.169
it's too bad, people think it was a mistake.
He told them not to check anyone for,

49:28.340 --> 49:31.659
you know, for hardware if they wanted to carry
it in.

49:32.320 --> 49:36.659
And you know people walked in like any other of
his meetings,

49:36.949 --> 49:40.469
and unfortunately, I guess some guys did come in.

49:41.449 --> 49:47.159
And that was the day that it happened, his
assassination.

49:48.520 --> 49:50.419
Yeah, so what did he do?

49:51.590 --> 49:54.810
Well, people were just shocked.
I mean, I mean,

49:54.850 --> 50:00.469
the whole place was in an uproar, but those
who did it,

50:00.610 --> 50:06.770
I mean, certainly had it well planned out to
get the attention of everyone in the auditorium.

50:06.770 --> 50:11.770
To look at them, you know, when they did the
distraction, you know,

50:11.810 --> 50:16.909
where two guys jumped up and one of them said,
'Get your hands out of my pocket.'

50:17.560 --> 50:24.189
All of us were looking at them when, then all of
a sudden we heard the shooting and there were

50:24.639 --> 50:27.729
people up front, guys who were shooting Malcolm.

50:28.000 --> 50:32.149
It was just a shock.
Then, of course, I mean all the chairs came

50:32.149 --> 50:36.360
crashing down and I don't know, they were
screaming and yelling and running,

50:36.419 --> 50:39.429
and it was just utter chaos.

50:41.459 --> 50:48.379
People were just,
I don't know, I mean the shock that this

50:48.379 --> 50:52.649
could happen
to Malcolm, of all people, and it certainly was,

50:52.939 --> 50:57.290
I think one of the greatest blows to the black
liberation movement,

50:58.020 --> 51:01.060
but then it didn't stop people.
I think after that,

51:01.100 --> 51:07.570
the movement mushroomed into a much more
radical struggle.

52:20.719 --> 52:27.550
James Foreman gave this amazing speech about the
importance of including

52:27.550 --> 52:34.320
a class analysis in one's analysis of race
or racism, so that was like, I

52:34.320 --> 52:35.560
think one of the.

52:36.219 --> 52:43.219
Moments in which I became persuaded that it
was possible to make those connections, which

52:43.219 --> 52:48.370
many people did not want to make in those days,
because now everyone talks about,

52:48.780 --> 52:53.449
you know, race, class, gender, sexuality, it's
like a mantra,

52:53.739 --> 52:55.540
but in those days, we were groping.

52:55.945 --> 53:01.975
Our way toward an understanding of how it might
be possible to bring those together.

53:02.104 --> 53:07.705
There was a lot of male supremacy in the black
movement, and I remember James Foreman always

53:07.705 --> 53:12.324
talked about how important women were to the
struggle.

53:12.705 --> 53:15.054
I am sick of the racist wall.

53:16.689 --> 53:19.969
When we don't have justice in the United States.

53:21.189 --> 53:23.760
You talked about Ruby Doris Smith Robinson.

53:24.270 --> 53:29.689
She's never received the credit she deserves
for the organizing she did in the South,

53:29.939 --> 53:33.770
yeah, because people know who almost all
those big names were,

53:34.300 --> 53:40.219
but not the women who did the work, who did the
real work and it seems to me.

53:40.314 --> 53:46.304
That if we want to encourage young people to
continue to do the organizing work that will

53:46.304 --> 53:50.695
lead to social movements that will hopefully
have a radical impact.

53:51.465 --> 53:54.155
We have to legitimize the role of the organizer,
which means also legitimizing work that, um,

54:02.735 --> 54:03.735
that women, women have done, the work that
you've done.

54:04.300 --> 54:10.360
Well, I mean, we've been talking about that, we've
been talking about how important that work is.

54:10.360 --> 54:15.610
And without, without the initiative that you
took, we couldn't talk about Malcolm's

54:15.610 --> 54:19.770
important relationship, uh, with Asians and Asian
Americans.

54:20.439 --> 54:27.399
The way history is remembered, and you know what
is subjugated

54:27.399 --> 54:33.620
in our memory, and you know presented to young
people today: that whole history of women of

54:33.620 --> 54:40.260
color working together around international
political projects is very much marginalized.

54:40.330 --> 54:47.330
Uh, not very many women who work within women
of color formations today are

54:47.330 --> 54:53.750
aware of, uh, the Third World Women's Alliance.
And, um, and that sort of really powerful

54:53.750 --> 55:00.679
emergence of, um, feminist energy that insisted
on, um, issues

55:00.679 --> 55:06.110
of class and race, uh, and then eventually
sexuality, right?

55:06.199 --> 55:10.909
Uh, but you know, many of those people who are
in the Third Women's Alliance,

55:11.080 --> 55:15.110
I think,
were also those who are at the beginning of the

55:15.409 --> 55:20.479
formation of the Vener Amos brigade.
I think, though, the way you tell the history,

55:20.810 --> 55:27.689
uh, it's very clear that that all of those
struggles and all of those issues always

55:27.689 --> 55:31.649
intersect.
Yes, and people cross over.

55:32.050 --> 55:34.770
And support other people's issues.

55:35.189 --> 55:38.979
I think that's what has always happened.
I'm remembering that,

55:38.989 --> 55:44.350
um, Denise Oliver, for example, you know, who
was one of the the leaders of the Young Lords,

55:44.389 --> 55:47.780
and she was not, she was black, she was black,
right, right,

55:47.929 --> 55:51.139
and there were Puerto Ricans like the Torres
brothers and all,

55:51.389 --> 55:54.070
uh, Chango Monges.
They were more with a black group,

55:54.399 --> 55:57.620
Black Panther.
There was Elizabeth Martinez,

55:57.810 --> 56:01.770
you know, who was one of the main organizers in
SNCC.

56:01.780 --> 56:03.500
Yeah, there were people who crossed the lines.

56:03.770 --> 56:06.770
There were even Asians in the Black Panther
Party, that's right,

56:06.909 --> 56:10.379
like Richard O and I don't know, Oakland or
whatever, you know,

56:12.590 --> 56:17.969
I knew him back in those days, yeah, historical
things that people don't understand: that when

56:17.969 --> 56:19.439
blacks happen to be.

56:19.830 --> 56:25.270
sent along with American soldiers at the turn
of the century to the Philippines that a lot of

56:25.270 --> 56:31.590
Those black soldiers were appalled at the
brutality of white American soldiers, and they

56:31.590 --> 56:36.110
went into the mountains when they were in the
Philippines and hooked up with the

56:36.110 --> 56:42.669
Philippine guerrillas, and you can get proof
of a lot of it by the fact that so

56:42.669 --> 56:48.429
many Black news writers had written about
those things.

56:48.719 --> 56:50.830
Yet you don't hear about it that much.

56:51.080 --> 56:57.800
But even way back, that group called the
Saint Patrick's Brigade was sent out to go

56:57.800 --> 57:00.649
after the Mexicans, and they were with the
American army,

57:00.959 --> 57:07.919
but when they realized that those poor Mexicans
were like the Irish peasants who were

57:07.919 --> 57:10.899
fighting for their freedom, and, you know, from
the British,

57:11.050 --> 57:16.800
those Irish people went on the other side and
joined the Mexicans.

57:17.320 --> 57:20.780
I think things like that have happened, and back
in the 19th century,

57:21.360 --> 57:28.080
the National Colored Labor Union, which was
formed because black people weren't allowed

57:28.520 --> 57:35.350
to join the National Labor Union, was really the
only major labor organization

57:35.350 --> 57:38.919
that spoke out against the Asian exclusion laws.
Oh yeah,

57:39.310 --> 57:45.840
and so did Frederick Douglass.
There's been this kind of crossover all over

57:45.840 --> 57:52.120
where a lot of people wonder when people say,
have Asians ever done anything for Africans or

57:52.120 --> 57:58.959
China in 1965, when Mao was in power, sent
thousands of workers to

57:59.004 --> 58:03.445
help build the Tanzan railway. Yeah.

58:03.675 --> 58:07.524
And then on the other hand, here was a person
like Ho Chi Minh,

58:07.955 --> 58:13.314
who supported the Garvey movement in Harlem,
and who also lived in the black community in

58:13.314 --> 58:16.419
Chicago.
Then when you think even before that, in the

58:16.419 --> 58:21.090
early twenties, people like Sen Katayama, the
Japanese labor leader,

58:21.340 --> 58:27.090
and Claude McKay began the Communist Party of
New York.

58:27.379 --> 58:29.489
And it's too bad that so many people don't know.

58:32.020 --> 58:34.500
You know, my name was Angela Davis, right?

58:35.409 --> 58:36.760
I mean, it still is.

58:37.649 --> 58:43.860
But I was that Angela Davis everybody was
organizing around and talking about.

58:45.030 --> 58:52.030
Um, and when I got out of jail, oh, first of all,
it was really

58:52.030 --> 58:56.979
scary, and that was almost as scary as facing
the death penalty.

58:57.639 --> 59:03.939
The idea that all of these millions of
people all over the world had

59:04.280 --> 59:09.919
this idea about this person whose name was
Angela Davis.

59:11.149 --> 59:17.219
And you know, I kept thinking, you know,
everybody's gonna be so disappointed.

59:18.179 --> 59:23.939
They had this idea that I was a
different kind of revolutionary.

59:24.760 --> 59:30.120
Um, that the way I talked would be different,
because there were,

59:30.239 --> 59:34.429
you know, certain notions of what a
revolutionary was like,

59:34.800 --> 59:41.719
and, you know, I tried it, but years later, I
meet

59:41.719 --> 59:43.510
people and.

59:44.310 --> 59:51.179
They, you know, they tell me the stories they
have, stories through

59:51.399 --> 59:58.169
the campaign around my case that link them to
their past, and I think this is

59:58.169 --> 01:00:04.760
so important, particularly since this story is
not recorded in the places where

01:00:04.760 --> 01:00:07.719
people learn the history of this country.

01:00:15.550 --> 01:00:22.350
Yeah, I know you have a

01:00:22.350 --> 01:00:28.870
long, long history of involvement with, um
political prisoners from

01:00:29.350 --> 01:00:36.229
Geronimo Pratt to Mumia, to have

01:00:36.229 --> 01:00:40.699
heard, you know, we all know that you and
George Jackson were very close.

01:00:40.909 --> 01:00:42.340
Well, how did you meet?

01:00:42.750 --> 01:00:44.989
I was fired from my position.

01:00:45.860 --> 01:00:48.719
in the philosophy department at UCLA.

01:00:51.659 --> 01:00:53.129
Of the Communist Party.

01:00:54.679 --> 01:01:00.919
There was a statute on the books in the
University of California that had its origins

01:01:00.919 --> 01:01:07.560
in the McCarthy era that prohibited the
university from hiring anyone who

01:01:07.560 --> 01:01:12.199
was a member of the Communist Party, so that's
where that—I had no idea that there was such a

01:01:12.199 --> 01:01:13.239
statute because I.

01:01:14.070 --> 01:01:20.389
was identified by the Regents and the governor
as, uh, this dangerous

01:01:20.389 --> 01:01:27.070
communist, and as it turned out, many people
who were in prison, of course, read

01:01:27.350 --> 01:01:29.790
read the articles in the newspaper.

01:01:30.600 --> 01:01:37.280
And I began to get letters from people in
prison, and I didn't realize

01:01:37.280 --> 01:01:44.199
that George had written me until after he and
Fleeta Drumgo and

01:01:44.199 --> 01:01:51.110
John Cushat were charged with the killing
of a guard

01:01:51.110 --> 01:01:56.010
at Soledad Prison in January of 1970.

01:01:56.610 --> 01:02:02.060
And of course they became collectively known as
the Soledad Brothers.

01:02:02.550 --> 01:02:06.909
I received death threats every day, scores and
scores of them,

01:02:06.949 --> 01:02:11.139
hundreds, thousands of death threats, so, uh,
because I was,

01:02:11.350 --> 01:02:15.149
I was a communist because I was a communist
because I was black,

01:02:15.959 --> 01:02:19.850
you know.
Uh, so I got, you know, people would,

01:02:19.959 --> 01:02:25.070
would say you're gonna be dead by sundown, you
know, go back to Russia,

01:02:25.199 --> 01:02:29.010
go back to Africa, you know, all kinds of
really, um,

01:02:29.360 --> 01:02:30.429
nasty things.

01:02:31.139 --> 01:02:36.080
And so I had to, uh, have security with me all
the time,

01:02:36.120 --> 01:02:40.169
armed security, and Jonathan, who was about 17 at the time,

01:02:40.239 --> 01:02:45.760
he became a part of that security force. I traveled up and down the states speaking out on

01:02:45.760 --> 01:02:47.669
behalf of George.

01:02:47.879 --> 01:02:53.280
George then learned about the work that I was doing, and we began to correspond.

01:02:53.699 --> 01:02:55.679
I actually only met with him

01:02:56.239 --> 01:03:02.790
individually, I think twice. I felt that since I was fighting for my right to
teach and since the argument I was making was

01:03:02.790 --> 01:03:09.459
that the Regents wanted to fire me because of my
radical politics,

01:03:09.750 --> 01:03:13.780
not because I wasn't
able to carry out the job for which I was hired,

01:03:13.860 --> 01:03:16.429
I felt that there was a similar situation with

01:03:16.989 --> 01:03:22.739
the Soledad brothers: that they were being charged with murder because of their politics,

01:03:22.739 --> 01:03:28.919
and not because they were responsible for the
actual incident which involved the killing of a

01:03:28.919 --> 01:03:35.469
guard at Soledad.

01:03:35.469 --> 01:03:37.149
And Jonathan was killed; he was

01:03:37.810 --> 01:03:40.389
killed a year before, huh?

01:03:45.780 --> 01:03:47.320
He was killed a year before I was arrested.

01:03:48.070 --> 01:03:54.739
In October of 1970, a couple of months after Jonathan was
killed, I was involved in helping to develop

01:03:54.739 --> 01:04:01.379
the case for the Soledad brothers
even after I had been arrested myself, and

01:04:01.379 --> 01:04:07.929
at the same time we thought
about how to build a movement to free all political prisoners and even

01:04:07.929 --> 01:04:13.780
a very deep emotional relationship, such as the one I had with George, revolved
around our attempts to understand what was going on in the world and how we could

01:04:14.139 --> 01:04:20.939
encourage people to become revolutionaries, you
know, what

01:04:20.939 --> 01:04:27.080
what is the relationship between political prisoners and the huge number of people who
went to prison because they were targets of racism.

01:04:27.080 --> 01:04:31.010
And that was the mark of an era.

01:04:31.320 --> 01:04:37.280
The FBI has issued a warrant for the arrest of Angela Yvonne Davis, black communist militant.

01:04:37.280 --> 01:04:43.520
She has allegedly purchased several guns in the
past and is possibly armed and dangerous.

01:04:44.459 --> 01:04:50.709
If I had been arrested in North Carolina or
some place like that,

01:04:50.709 --> 01:04:56.050
it would have been a very
different situation,

01:04:56.050 --> 01:04:59.000
because the very night I was arrested,

01:04:59.310 --> 01:05:02.850
people gathered outside of the jail, and as I
was being arrested and going through the whole

01:05:03.770 --> 01:05:06.040
process of being fingerprinted and being put

01:05:07.689 --> 01:05:13.330
into a sort of solitary cell, I could hear
all the

01:05:13.330 --> 01:05:19.169
people chanting.

01:05:19.169 --> 01:05:26.060
Could you talk about those two months, or do you want to still keep it
quiet about where you were or who?

01:05:26.060 --> 01:05:32.850


01:05:33.169 --> 01:05:35.129


01:05:36.179 --> 01:05:42.939
Well, I was with a man named David
Poindexter, who was also arrested on charges

01:05:42.939 --> 01:05:45.689
of federal charges of harboring a fugitive.

01:05:46.550 --> 01:05:48.610
Uh, he won the case.

01:05:49.179 --> 01:05:52.379
I saw quite a few policemen.

01:05:52.780 --> 01:05:54.060
They didn't recognize me.

01:05:55.159 --> 01:05:58.189
I don't think anyone could have recognized me.
I was pretty,

01:05:58.389 --> 01:06:03.060
pretty well made up, especially since
people associated me with the,

01:06:03.889 --> 01:06:08.060
you know, the big afro, and no one
recognized you.

01:06:08.229 --> 01:06:13.149
Well, I had on a wig.
I had on more makeup than I've ever had on in

01:06:13.149 --> 01:06:15.189
my life.
I had false eyelashes.

01:06:15.389 --> 01:06:22.189
Did you have safe houses or did you just
play it all improvised?

01:06:22.189 --> 01:06:23.530
Scary.

01:06:23.750 --> 01:06:26.939
And then wait, where did they move you after
that?

01:06:27.310 --> 01:06:33.659
They moved me to the Marin County Jail.

01:06:35.510 --> 01:06:40.429
Where I stayed for about a year because I never
had the opportunity to go outside and I was

01:06:40.429 --> 01:06:41.459
pale.

01:06:42.030 --> 01:06:46.219
My eyes got worse because I never had the
opportunity to use them.

01:06:46.429 --> 01:06:50.459
Oh, you know, you're just in a cell and you get
to, to

01:06:50.550 --> 01:06:56.300
uh, look, say, six feet across the room and then
suddenly you go into a larger space,

01:06:56.389 --> 01:06:57.699
it's difficult to see.

01:07:01.560 --> 01:07:07.459
I'd like to sort of take note of the fact
that the three of us are sitting here and

01:07:07.459 --> 01:07:09.899
that's quite amazing because we have.

01:07:15.060 --> 01:07:21.489
And I'm thinking about the personal and
political relationships that go back, uh, with

01:07:21.489 --> 01:07:24.719
Charlene since 1967.

01:07:25.129 --> 01:07:29.050
I mean, it was because of Charlene Mitchell that
I joined the Communist Party.

01:07:30.120 --> 01:07:37.110
You know Charlene and her brother Franklin,
who's no longer with us, and Kendra

01:07:37.110 --> 01:07:44.070
Alexander, his wife, both of whom played an enormous role in building
this campaign, and I have known Margaret since

01:07:44.070 --> 01:07:50.310
before I was born.

01:07:51.810 --> 01:07:52.830
Literally.

01:07:53.689 --> 01:07:56.729
We were born across the street from each
other in Birmingham,

01:07:56.810 --> 01:08:03.800
Alabama, and our mothers were best friends and
still are best friends, and when I was arrested

01:08:03.800 --> 01:08:08.889
and got taken to the FBI building, I didn't
know where they were taking me or what was

01:08:08.889 --> 01:08:11.239
going on.
They wouldn't let me make a phone call.

01:08:11.449 --> 01:08:14.320
I mean, for a while I thought they were gonna
kill me because I hadn't,

01:08:14.449 --> 01:08:18.529
I had no contact with anyone.
These, I, I refused to speak to the FBI.

01:08:19.120 --> 01:08:23.750
You know, because I learned as a child that you
don't talk to the FBI.

01:08:24.000 --> 01:08:30.759
And finally they told me that there was
someone who said she was

01:08:30.759 --> 01:08:36.959
my attorney, but she looked like she was about
16 years old, and they didn't believe that she

01:08:36.959 --> 01:08:37.959
was an attorney.

01:08:41.240 --> 01:08:47.439
So Margaret was the first attorney, and of
course, you know, the fact that she was

01:08:47.439 --> 01:08:53.399
there meant everything in the world to me, and
she stayed with the case until the acquittal.

01:08:53.399 --> 01:08:56.509
That was 18 months later, I think.

01:08:57.589 --> 01:09:03.640
And she brought her family out to California,
and she moved.

01:09:04.770 --> 01:09:11.589
And was responsible for helping to put together
the entire team until that jury said not guilty.

01:09:11.589 --> 01:09:14.939
And we thought we would lose this woman, we
really did.

01:09:15.229 --> 01:09:19.990
But what strikes me as nearly miraculous every
time I think about it.

01:09:20.499 --> 01:09:25.528
This campaign, and this case, is that
Angela's voice,

01:09:25.659 --> 01:09:29.778
the voice that we've just heard, that work, those
books,

01:09:29.938 --> 01:09:35.938
those rallies that she's attended, her
continuing ability to reconstruct and rethink

01:09:35.938 --> 01:09:40.099
the problems that we face as a country, and as a
movement.

01:09:40.640 --> 01:09:45.399
To bring to us the issue of prisons,
in the way in which,

01:09:45.410 --> 01:09:51.109
the leadership that she's given to that
issue would have been silenced if we

01:09:51.109 --> 01:09:56.959
hadn't won.
Following Angela's being put on the

01:09:56.959 --> 01:10:03.899
FBI's most wanted list and so on, our campaign
was to secure her right to

01:10:03.899 --> 01:10:07.069
come back into an environment.

01:10:07.669 --> 01:10:12.620
That would permit her to come back without
being killed, because once you're on the FBI's

01:10:12.620 --> 01:10:17.180
most wanted list, you know, they have a right
to kill you to bring you back, and the other was

01:10:17.180 --> 01:10:22.970
that she would have a fair hearing,
which was certainly not to be had; this was clearly

01:10:22.970 --> 01:10:27.979
the big case not only against Angela but for
the FBI.

01:10:28.600 --> 01:10:33.839
Because they were making major claims that they
were gonna stop all this quote terrorism in its

01:10:33.839 --> 01:10:39.200
tracks. The idea was to build a movement that
was communist, that was not communist,

01:10:39.279 --> 01:10:43.000
it was political, that was not political, that
was religious,

01:10:43.009 --> 01:10:46.439
that was not religious, that was women, that was
African American, Latino, Asian, Native

01:10:46.759 --> 01:10:52.810
American, and in all of these instances,
all of these peoples were included, and that was,

01:10:52.919 --> 01:10:55.899
you know, all of these peoples were included, and that was,
you know,

01:10:55.979 --> 01:11:01.020
this was a major effort because not at all
times was there the trust that one could always

01:11:01.020 --> 01:11:04.540
get. But we knew in order to win Angela's
freedom, we had to do it.

01:11:05.439 --> 01:11:09.629
OK.
Actually, look over the trees there.

01:11:09.790 --> 01:11:13.020
This is all park land, but it's not.

01:11:14.390 --> 01:11:18.759
You don't feel like you're confined with all
the trees around you,

01:11:18.770 --> 01:11:22.770
you're—
No, I'm fine, I love trees.

01:11:24.740 --> 01:11:28.040
So these are the two little books that I was
gonna, oh,

01:11:28.220 --> 01:11:34.810
OK, one is called Our Prisons Obsolete and the
other one is called

01:11:34.810 --> 01:11:39.979
Abolition Democracy.
So I'm gonna, uh, oh wait,

01:11:40.169 --> 01:11:43.060
you're gonna get, oh, absolutely, absolutely.

01:11:48.689 --> 01:11:52.370
Gee, I think all the prisoners would love to.

01:11:53.859 --> 01:11:59.899
Read this.
There we. So.

01:12:02.160 --> 01:12:05.870
Welfare Critical Resistance.

01:12:20.569 --> 01:12:26.919
I think you should be proud that all of you are
people.

01:12:27.589 --> 01:12:31.109
Who support political prisoners.

01:12:38.689 --> 01:12:42.779
The U.S. prison industrial complex

01:12:46.410 --> 01:12:48.819
corruptness and racism.

01:12:51.560 --> 01:12:56.310
Real security is locking up more and more people.

01:12:57.669 --> 01:13:03.410
That's not what real security is.
Real security is knowing that you will have

01:13:03.410 --> 01:13:07.759
shelter, that you will have food, that you will
have beauty in your life,

01:13:08.240 --> 01:13:11.290
that you have a future, that your family has a
future.

01:13:11.370 --> 01:13:16.560
That's what security is.
We need to shut down a facility and get that

01:13:16.560 --> 01:13:17.870
money reallocated.

01:13:18.160 --> 01:13:22.549
It requires not just like suing, not even just
legislation to close it down,

01:13:22.759 --> 01:13:28.080
but really an intense amount of organizing.
I cannot believe that 10 years have passed

01:13:28.080 --> 01:13:30.029
since the first Critical Resistance.

01:13:33.100 --> 01:13:35.640
And we are still here.

01:13:36.770 --> 01:13:43.410
As a result of 10 years of extraordinary
organizing by Critical Resistance and

01:13:43.410 --> 01:13:50.240
by other organizers and activists all over the
country and in other parts of the world.

01:13:50.569 --> 01:13:57.529
The work that people have done over the years
around cases of political prisoners can be the

01:13:57.529 --> 01:14:03.859
basis for a larger movement to challenge the
proliferation of prisons,

01:14:04.129 --> 01:14:08.790
which is threatening to, you know, take over
large areas of,

01:14:08.850 --> 01:14:15.839
our society, you know, for example,
education funds that should be going into

01:14:15.839 --> 01:14:19.399
education are now going into the construction
of, yeah,

01:14:19.689 --> 01:14:22.669
both building prisons and providing.

01:14:23.149 --> 01:14:29.609
The funds for the holding of 1.5 million
people in prison.

01:14:29.609 --> 01:14:36.580
I think you're the one that really started the
you know, the movement to support political

01:14:36.810 --> 01:14:41.620
prisoners, didn't you?
Well, no, I don't know, no, exactly, exactly,

01:14:41.919 --> 01:14:48.589
exactly, but there have been cases before that,

01:14:48.790 --> 01:14:55.020
Remember, there was the case of Huey Newton, uh,
and the first case I got involved with,

01:14:55.069 --> 01:15:01.430
I think was, um, Nelson Mandela, yes, and, and
the Puerto Rican

01:15:01.430 --> 01:15:06.245
nationalists.
Well, that's when I think one of the first

01:15:06.615 --> 01:15:13.234
people that I started writing to was Lolita,
and we wrote for a long time that

01:15:13.415 --> 01:15:19.575
when she was freed, I couldn't believe I was
finally going to get to meet her.

01:15:19.975 --> 01:15:25.285
She and Oscar Coyaso and Rafael Miranda had
been at, were at that time,

01:15:25.294 --> 01:15:28.694
the longest held political prisoners in the
history of this country.

01:15:29.279 --> 01:15:33.500
The struggle against the death penalty is the
front line of the struggle against the prison

01:15:33.500 --> 01:15:35.089
industrial complex.

01:15:35.580 --> 01:15:40.669
As prisons become more numerous, more
repressive, including the supermax prisons,

01:15:40.740 --> 01:15:44.209
as they become more intertwined with the
corporate economy,

01:15:44.459 --> 01:15:47.740
they influence the
practices of other institutions,

01:15:47.770 --> 01:15:51.859
especially schools. Ever younger people are
tried as adults.

01:15:51.870 --> 01:15:58.459
The schools that are attended by these children
become increasingly like prisons focusing on

01:15:58.459 --> 01:16:02.540
surveillance and discipline and security and
not on education.

01:16:03.729 --> 01:16:06.009
They are prep schools for prison.

01:16:07.129 --> 01:16:13.350
This is very much in line with the fact that
they'll pay $30,000 a year to house someone for

01:16:13.350 --> 01:16:19.629
life practically who has, uh, uh, been convicted
under the three strikes measures but they won't

01:16:19.629 --> 01:16:22.069
try to come up with money to guarantee.

01:16:22.459 --> 01:16:28.109
That someone will go through a, uh, the
university system so that they don't end up in

01:16:28.109 --> 01:16:31.560
these alternative economies that lead them, you
know, to prison.

01:16:31.720 --> 01:16:37.879
We have to develop a vocabulary and a whole set
of arguments that will begin to break down, uh,

01:16:37.879 --> 01:16:43.439
the way in which people tend to think about, uh,
crime in relationship to their own lives in

01:16:43.439 --> 01:16:45.350
relationship to their own fears.

01:16:45.560 --> 01:16:48.229
I mean, what about environmental crime?

01:16:49.419 --> 01:16:53.740
What about forms of crime that have an impact
on everyone?

01:16:54.709 --> 01:17:01.660
When that disaster hit New Orleans, the people
could not

01:17:01.660 --> 01:17:02.839
escape.

01:17:03.430 --> 01:17:07.990
Among the thousands of people left to rising
floodwaters were hundreds of Orleans Parish

01:17:07.990 --> 01:17:13.270
prisoners. Prison guards and officials simply
walked away from flooding jail cells that

01:17:13.270 --> 01:17:18.149
imprisoned 6,000.
Prisoners were trapped for as long as four days in

01:17:18.149 --> 01:17:20.189
sewage-tainted water up to their chests.

01:17:20.595 --> 01:17:25.955
Without food and water.
When the US government sent forces,

01:17:26.274 --> 01:17:32.464
they only protected the property of the people
who owned.

01:17:33.845 --> 01:17:37.305
A lot, but black people even today

01:17:37.930 --> 01:17:42.390
do not have adequate living conditions.

01:17:42.879 --> 01:17:49.160
I think it certainly exposed the total lack of

01:17:50.890 --> 01:17:56.629
care. You would think America would be so
ashamed.

01:18:05.279 --> 01:18:06.279
That

01:18:11.850 --> 01:18:18.529
even though as many as 200,000 Asian women and
young

01:18:18.529 --> 01:18:25.040
girls, mostly from Korea, but also including
the Philippines, China,

01:18:25.290 --> 01:18:31.680
Indonesia, and other Pacific islands were taken
away deceptively.

01:18:32.299 --> 01:18:39.240
And methodically by Japanese soldiers and
sexually violated in the most frightening

01:18:39.450 --> 01:18:45.970
and systematic manner. These victims,
insultingly called the comfort

01:18:45.970 --> 01:18:52.609
women, were not mentioned in the Tokyo tribunal
because Japan and the

01:18:52.609 --> 01:18:57.729
United States conspired to shelve this
issue.

01:18:58.500 --> 01:19:05.200
The Korean women have not forgotten about it,
and for the sake of all comfort women,

01:19:05.490 --> 01:19:11.850
both those who died and those surviving, they
demonstrate every

01:19:11.850 --> 01:19:16.689
Wednesday in front of the Japanese embassy in
Seoul, Korea.

01:19:19.049 --> 01:19:25.609
We must force or shame Japan to give reparation
to these women

01:19:25.839 --> 01:19:28.350
whose lives they destroyed.

01:19:29.339 --> 01:19:35.500
Also to their men who slaved in coal mines
under harsh and

01:19:35.500 --> 01:19:40.729
racist conditions and also have not been
compensated.

01:19:41.990 --> 01:19:48.540
And should reparation be won, may it set an
international

01:19:48.540 --> 01:19:55.169
legal precedent that the world will never
again allow forced sexual

01:19:55.169 --> 01:19:58.169
slavery and forced labor.

01:20:00.310 --> 01:20:03.919
An unusual punishment in wartime.

01:20:04.810 --> 01:20:10.560
What do we need besides the right to speak
out,

01:20:10.850 --> 01:20:17.419
write leaflets, email, march, and demonstrate.
The most powerful

01:20:17.419 --> 01:20:22.000
weapon for we women of color is truth.

01:20:22.290 --> 01:20:25.890
Go out and tell the truth everywhere.

01:20:37.700 --> 01:20:44.160
Well, I think the one issue that's bringing
everybody together is Mumia.

01:20:44.930 --> 01:20:50.359
Mumia is the new Malcolm.
I mean, they call him the voice of the voiceless

01:20:50.359 --> 01:20:53.930
because he was always for the underdog, whether
you were in prison or out.

01:20:54.509 --> 01:20:59.169
And he has a way of reaching out to all kinds
of people,

01:20:59.200 --> 01:21:04.700
people who had never been in the movement
before, because he represents all political

01:21:04.700 --> 01:21:10.240
prisoners, and political prisoners were the ones
who were community activists who were the most

01:21:10.240 --> 01:21:16.810
vocal and the most visible, and I think that's
one of the reasons why the

01:21:17.450 --> 01:21:24.129
campaign to free Mumia is so important, but
also learning about Mumia people are

01:21:24.129 --> 01:21:27.319
finally learning about political prisoners in
general.

01:21:27.729 --> 01:21:32.319
One of the groups, well, and who's always
supported political prisoners,

01:21:32.490 --> 01:21:38.049
but who have been the most political are the
well, lesbians and gays and, you know, the queer

01:21:38.049 --> 01:21:41.490
nation.
I mean, they have supported black political

01:21:41.490 --> 01:21:43.930
prisoners, the Puerto Ricans.

01:21:44.509 --> 01:21:48.370
Native Americans, uh, and many of them went to
jail.

01:21:48.629 --> 01:21:50.540
Well, they all did a lot of work.

01:21:50.950 --> 01:21:56.509
I work with an organization in Australia called
Sisters Inside, which focuses on women in prison.

01:21:56.950 --> 01:22:00.890
And that's a multiracial organization:
Aboriginal people,

01:22:01.080 --> 01:22:07.350
South Asian people, uh, white Australians as
there is a disproportionate number of black

01:22:07.350 --> 01:22:12.879
people and Latinos in prisons in the US,
there's a disproportionate number of Aboriginal

01:22:12.879 --> 01:22:16.359
people, but it's the same thing also in Europe.
Who do you find?

01:22:16.399 --> 01:22:20.250
You find people from Africa, people from Asia
who are behind bars.

01:22:20.279 --> 01:22:23.470
That's the postcolonial situation there.

01:22:23.990 --> 01:22:30.729
And what, uh, I suppose disturbs me is that we
haven't figured out how to build, um

01:22:30.899 --> 01:22:35.700
a global movement so that we can all learn from
each other.

01:22:35.779 --> 01:22:40.580
Affirmative action, immigrant rights,
sovereignty for Hawaiians,

01:22:40.700 --> 01:22:47.500
police brutality, fight against homophobia,
fight against racial violence, against

01:22:47.500 --> 01:22:50.810
the unjust US blockade of Cuba.

01:22:51.259 --> 01:22:52.700
Today, one of the.

01:22:52.950 --> 01:22:59.740
Important issues and long ignored is the
support for political prisoners

01:22:59.740 --> 01:23:01.930
right here in USA.

01:23:02.140 --> 01:23:05.770
You may have supported Mandela and others
elsewhere in the world,

01:23:06.100 --> 01:23:12.660
but here we have so many political prisoners
and the US government will not admit to them.

01:23:13.250 --> 01:23:18.410
We have hundreds who should be recognized as
heroes and heroines.

01:23:18.689 --> 01:23:24.569
They are now doing 15 and 20 years behind the
wall and are almost forgotten.

01:23:25.009 --> 01:23:31.080
They were once community activists in the Black
Panther Party, in the Republic of New Africa,

01:23:31.290 --> 01:23:33.410
the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican.

01:23:34.529 --> 01:23:41.450
Movement, American Indian Movement, white
anti-imperialist groups, including the

01:23:41.450 --> 01:23:46.040
queer nation which has been one of the
strongest supporters for political prisoners,

01:23:46.370 --> 01:23:49.129
they must not be forgotten. They must.

01:23:50.089 --> 01:23:56.490
Research, and you are the ones that must be the
ones that carry the messages to the people

01:23:56.490 --> 01:24:03.470
today.
And we've heard about Abu

01:24:03.470 --> 01:24:08.850
Ghraib, we've heard about Guantanamo, we've
heard about all of the CIA secret prisons,

01:24:08.950 --> 01:24:14.299
Uh, subject to rendition so that they can be
tortured in countries,

01:24:14.390 --> 01:24:21.040
uh, that engage in that practice which then
allows the US to wipe its hands and

01:24:21.310 --> 01:24:25.084
argue that.
Uh, you know, torture isn't a strategy that,

01:24:25.145 --> 01:24:31.044
that, uh, the US government uses, but we know
that torture goes on in domestic prisons,

01:24:31.285 --> 01:24:37.694
so, but I think we've got to give a lot more
attention

01:24:37.964 --> 01:24:42.125
to stopping US wars forever.
I mean, did you think.

01:24:43.220 --> 01:24:49.850
The movement against the war is not as powerful
as it was against the Vietnam

01:24:49.850 --> 01:24:55.379
War.
You know, actually I think the sentiment is

01:24:55.379 --> 01:24:56.709
even more powerful.

01:25:00.120 --> 01:25:06.419
Oh, when we consider that over the last

01:25:06.419 --> 01:25:13.419
years we've had demonstrations that have been
so much larger than any of the

01:25:13.419 --> 01:25:19.979
uh, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, it's not so
much the fact that people are less

01:25:19.979 --> 01:25:24.299
opposed to war than they were then, it's a.

01:25:24.709 --> 01:25:31.660
It's a question of how we transform those
sentiments into oppositional political

01:25:31.660 --> 01:25:33.089
um, stances.

01:25:33.500 --> 01:25:39.629
Do you think American people realize like that
first a

01:25:39.629 --> 01:25:44.169
million Iraqi civilians have been killed and I
hear.

01:25:44.819 --> 01:25:51.819
2 million or so are refugees in Iraq and 3 or 4
million had

01:25:51.819 --> 01:25:54.970
to go to other neighboring countries.

01:25:55.459 --> 01:26:01.500
That's a lot of people when people were opposed
to the war in Vietnam.

01:26:02.310 --> 01:26:08.509
There, there seemed to be some empathy, some
sense of identification with Vietnamese

01:26:08.509 --> 01:26:14.140
people, whereas many people who are against the
war in Iraq today

01:26:14.910 --> 01:26:20.089
don't think about Iraqi people at all and
there's no,

01:26:20.209 --> 01:26:25.939
there's no sense of connection, um, what I
think is that the,

01:26:26.189 --> 01:26:30.549
the nationalism, US nationalism is a major.

01:26:31.419 --> 01:26:38.220
Obstacle and there's a connection between the
proliferation of, uh, prisons and places of

01:26:38.220 --> 01:26:44.370
detentions inside the US and the emergence of
the, um, prison

01:26:44.700 --> 01:26:51.700
as the main face of the US drive for empire and
this is why I think that

01:26:51.700 --> 01:26:56.410
uh.
That abolition, like death penalty abolition,

01:26:56.819 --> 01:27:03.819
prison abolition is so important a challenge
for young people who are active

01:27:03.819 --> 01:27:07.339
in that movement is to create, um.

01:27:07.910 --> 01:27:14.200
a vocabulary that will allow them to persuade
other people that, uh,

01:27:14.200 --> 01:27:20.580
the campaign to abolish prisons isn't only
about prisons, about education, it's about health

01:27:20.580 --> 01:27:24.750
care, it's about housing, jobs, and it's about an
end to racism.

01:27:24.819 --> 01:27:31.609
Right? However, we're just talking to
ourselves.

01:27:31.609 --> 01:27:37.100
There are many groups and people we have not
approached.

01:27:37.100 --> 01:27:42.509
We must utilize the help of progressive
newspapers.

01:27:42.509 --> 01:27:43.589
Progressive

01:27:44.339 --> 01:27:48.220
teachers.

01:27:49.569 --> 01:27:51.359
Progressive radio.

01:27:54.870 --> 01:27:59.899
Progressive churches because there may be some
that are sincerely interested.

01:28:03.270 --> 01:28:05.870
Progressive.

01:28:07.060 --> 01:28:13.790
Community, and hopefully, progressive hip hop
person.

01:28:22.149 --> 01:28:26.669
From George Jackson, some words of wisdom.

01:28:27.879 --> 01:28:29.410
Warning and truth.

01:28:30.600 --> 01:28:32.160
He said, prison

01:28:32.890 --> 01:28:39.720
It is a frightening, petrifying diffusion of
violence and intimidation

01:28:40.089 --> 01:28:47.000
emitted from the border and its crew,
controlled by absolute

01:28:47.000 --> 01:28:53.850
terror.
Every dirty trick of deception and brutality is

01:28:53.850 --> 01:28:59.319
employed without shame, without honor, without
humanity.

01:29:00.020 --> 01:29:06.410
Without reservation to either convert or
destroy

01:29:06.680 --> 01:29:12.479
rebellious arm, but the history of activists
has shown

01:29:12.839 --> 01:29:15.029
fearlessness and daring.

01:29:21.979 --> 01:29:28.509
Yeah.
One of the things that really

01:29:28.509 --> 01:29:34.600
impresses me about you, Yuri, is the way in
which you have learned that new

01:29:34.600 --> 01:29:39.640
vocabulary and, and, well, you have to learn it
if you're in the movement,

01:29:39.720 --> 01:29:43.560
right?
Music has always been.

01:29:44.680 --> 01:29:50.950
One of the strongest of the cultural arts,
whatever music is popular,

01:29:51.279 --> 01:29:58.120
it almost is a good indication of what society
is going through at the

01:29:58.120 --> 01:30:05.040
time. Hip hop and all cultural stuff, they are
at the

01:30:05.040 --> 01:30:07.470
forefront of the movement now.

01:30:08.140 --> 01:30:13.899
One of the problems I think with the 60s
or the 70s was that many of us had this very

01:30:13.899 --> 01:30:17.850
rigid idea about what it meant to be a
political activist.

01:30:18.180 --> 01:30:21.930
There were certain kinds of tasks associated
with political activism.

01:30:22.109 --> 01:30:26.379
If you didn't get out there and pass out the
leaflets, and you didn't come to all the

01:30:26.379 --> 01:30:30.910
meetings, if you
then you could not count yourself as a

01:30:30.910 --> 01:30:37.549
political activist. People tended to see
cultural workers as kind of appendages to

01:30:37.870 --> 01:30:41.959
political activism; that they provide the
entertainment for us,

01:30:42.069 --> 01:30:46.669
right, that we have these rallies in which
the leaders get up and give the.

01:30:47.049 --> 01:30:53.910
Uh, the political line and then the musicians,
come up and they provide us with some

01:30:53.910 --> 01:30:59.799
relief or the film is shown which allows us to
sort of relax for a moment so that we can get

01:30:59.799 --> 01:31:03.200
back to the real work of doing the political
organizing.

01:31:03.359 --> 01:31:06.109
It makes me think of something that Malcolm
said about

01:31:07.259 --> 01:31:13.330
the biggest threat is the person who could
communicate, and Malcolm himself was a

01:31:13.330 --> 01:31:15.959
communicator and he became a threat.

01:31:16.370 --> 01:31:22.879
Your history and how you became conscious of
the importance of

01:31:23.180 --> 01:31:29.080
fighting racism and inequality and injustice,
and fighting against war,

01:31:29.370 --> 01:31:31.370
we need to understand better.

01:31:32.160 --> 01:31:38.669
How that happens so that it's not accidental, so
that we can actually

01:31:38.669 --> 01:31:39.689
encourage it.

01:31:40.279 --> 01:31:47.229
The youth has to see that there are many things
going on today that are wrong

01:31:47.479 --> 01:31:51.750
and if they want to change it, to make the
future better.

01:31:52.770 --> 01:31:59.770
They have to be the activists and participate.
Absolutely, and you know, I think your

01:31:59.770 --> 01:32:06.649
history as someone who has always encouraged, um,
community building across the

01:32:06.649 --> 01:32:11.620
divisions
that usually keep us apart. Uh, oh yes, if there

01:32:11.620 --> 01:32:18.089
must be that kind of alliance, that kind of
getting to know one another better

01:32:18.339 --> 01:32:20.589
and doing things together.

01:32:20.939 --> 01:32:22.500
Oh yes, uh.

01:32:23.520 --> 01:32:27.270
OK, so where do you think it has to begin?

01:32:28.279 --> 01:32:35.080
Well, I think it begins wherever you are. I mean,
my sense has

01:32:35.080 --> 01:32:37.680
always been that activism isn't something
special.

01:32:38.149 --> 01:32:45.100
It's not located in a particular space.
It's about doing the work you're able to do

01:32:45.100 --> 01:32:51.339
given, uh, the position you're in at any given
moment or as soon as you hear

01:32:51.339 --> 01:32:57.930
something, like just reading a newspaper and
finding out some very

01:32:58.100 --> 01:33:04.709
uh, terrible story about injustice, that, and I
think a lot of

01:33:04.709 --> 01:33:07.100
people even, uh.

01:33:07.850 --> 01:33:09.870
Immediately respond.

01:33:10.509 --> 01:33:14.209
And then if they could actually organize.

01:33:15.240 --> 01:33:17.740
And get more people to respond.

01:33:19.160 --> 01:33:25.109
You ask yourself, you know, how, how was it
possible to build such an amazing movement

01:33:25.109 --> 01:33:27.200
against apartheid in South Africa?

01:33:27.629 --> 01:33:31.700
So I think the real challenge is to build a
sense of

01:33:31.709 --> 01:33:38.660
um, transnational community, transnational
solidarities, and then perhaps our

01:33:38.709 --> 01:33:44.229
our effort to end the, uh, the wars against
so-called terror.

01:33:44.589 --> 01:33:49.839
Uh, the war in Iraq and to prevent a war in
Iran will have a lot more substance,

01:33:49.939 --> 01:33:56.220
uh, will, um, lead people to feel a connection
with, uh,

01:33:56.500 --> 01:34:02.540
those, uh, who are suffering U.S. aggression
will not simply do.

01:34:02.725 --> 01:34:09.205
Say this is a threat to U.S. democracy, but that
this hurts

01:34:09.484 --> 01:34:16.484
men and women and children in ways that we
would never want our, uh, family members

01:34:16.484 --> 01:34:22.524
to be hurt.
It's about how one approaches, uh, uh, one's

01:34:22.524 --> 01:34:23.564
community and.

01:34:24.350 --> 01:34:31.259
It's about teaching people, I think, to think and
imagine beyond the present

01:34:31.259 --> 01:34:35.370
moment; to not be imprisoned in the present.
We're not,

01:34:35.419 --> 01:34:42.100
you know, prisoners of this effort to, uh, uh,
spread war throughout the world. We

01:34:42.100 --> 01:34:44.899
can, uh, come together and.

01:34:45.390 --> 01:34:52.240
Um, believe in and struggle for a better world,
and I mean the

01:34:52.240 --> 01:34:58.950
future does belong to the youth because they're
the only ones that would change tomorrow,

01:34:59.240 --> 01:35:04.509
yeah, OK, so yeah, so that's the challenge,
right.

01:35:16.959 --> 01:35:17.959
Cause I

01:35:39.299 --> 01:35:44.160
I'm here to tell you about destruction on the
eve of

01:36:11.060 --> 01:36:17.680
some. I'm

01:36:34.700 --> 01:36:39.629
It's not as simple and daily struggle.