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Draft:AAPA and Black Power

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The Asian American Movement and the Black Power Movement were two movements that were deeply connected through shared goals of anti-imperialism, racial justice, and student-led activism during the late 1960's.[1] Asian American activists, inspired by the Black Panther Party and Black Power ideology, participated in multiracial coalitions for racial justice and anti-imperialist struggles. Prominent figures like Richard Aoki and Yuri Kochiyama embodied this solidarity through their close friendship with Bobby Seale and Malcolm X, and support for Black liberation.[2][3] The Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) closely aligned with the Black Panthers and other radical Black groups in campaigns like the Third World Liberation Front strikes[4]. These connections influenced later expressions of solidarity, including Asian American support for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.[5] Community spaces like Everybody’s Bookstore in San Francisco served as hubs for sharing revolutionary ideas, reflecting the long-lasting impact of Black Power and Asian American alliances.[6]

Yuri Kochiyama and the Black Power Movement

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Yuri Kochiyama was a prominent Japanese American civil rights activist who strongly supported the Black Power Movement.[7][8]She was born in 1921 in San Pedro, California, where she grew up witnessing widespread anti-Asian racism and later experienced the injustices of Japanese American incarceration during World War II.[7][8] Her and her family’s forced incarceration influenced Yuri’s political beliefs and her desire to help political prisoners in the future.[7] She became well-known through her close friendship with Malcom X, and later on, her advocacy for the Black Power movement, prison justice and anti-imperialism struggles.[7][8][2] Kochiyama’s political activism is one of the most prominent examples of cross-racial solidarity between the Asian American and Black Power movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s.[7][8]

While Yuri’s early experience with state violence from her time at the concentration camp in Jerome, Arkansas shaped her critiques of American racism and imperialism, her most revolutionary political ideologies occurred after she moved with her family to public housing in Harlem, New York in the 1960’s.[7] It was there that she interacted with the Black community, learning more about their struggles.[7] Her involvement with the Black Power Movement started through her friendship with Malcom X, a significant Black Power activist.[7][8][2][9]Yuri and Malcom met in 1963, at a protest organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which aimed to address discrimination in construction hiring practices at Brooklyn’s Downstate Medical Center.[7][2] Kochiyama deeply admired X’s internationalist policies, especially his emphasis on human rights and self-determination for Black People.[7]

Yuri and Malcolm’s political relationship only grew over time, and she joined his Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) which sought to advance civil rights for Black Americans and linking their struggle to that of Africans globally.[7][2][10] It was there that Yuri attended classes, where she learned about the history of slavery and was able to connect that to the racism and violence she witnessed daily. [10] On February 21, 1965, A year after joining the OAAU, Yuri attended one of Malcolm’s speeches at the Audubon Ballroom where he was assassinated.[7][8][2][10][11] A widely circulated photograph captured her cradling his head in her lap in the moments after the shooting.[7][10]

Following the death of Malcolm X, Kochiyama started to align herself more with the revolutionary wing of the Black Liberation Movement. She supported the Black Panther Party, attended their rallies, and advocated for their community programs and imprisoned members[7][10]. Her activism extended to writing letters to political prisoners, organizing support networks, and speaking out against police violence and government repression[10][12]. She frequently criticized the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which targeted Black activists with surveillance and disruption. [12]

Kochiyama believed that Asian Americans had a responsibility to support Black liberation as part of a broader struggle against racism and colonialism.[13] She rejected the "model minority" stereotype, arguing that it served as a wedge to divide communities of color. Instead, she promoted a Third World liberation framework that emphasized global solidarity, anti-imperialism, and resistance to U.S. militarism.[7][12][14]

Black Panther Party and Asian American Activism

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The Black Power movement significantly influenced the rise of Asian American activism during the Civil Rights Era. In the Bay Area, many early Asian American organizations drew inspiration from Black Power and the Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in 1966 in Oakland by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.[15] The BPP advocated for armed self-defense, racial solidarity, and liberation for all oppressed groups. [16][17]

The most well-documented Asian American to work with the Black Panther Party was Richard Aoki, a Japanese American activist and educator. Aoki was interned during World War II with his family in Topaz, Utah, part of the U.S. government's incarceration of Japanese Americans. After the war, he grew up in West Oakland, then a predominantly Black neighborhood. Following high school, he enlisted in the U.S. military, and developed a proficiency with firearms. He spent 8 years in the Reserves, during which he became acquainted with radical politics and social organizations.[3]

In 1966, Aoki met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale through the Soul Student’s Advisory Council at Merritt College in Oakland. He was involved in the Party’s formation and assisted in making their original Ten-Point Program.[3] Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time credits Aoki as the first supplier of guns to the Black Panther Party, allowing them for their first open carry police patrols, also known as "copwatching".[18] Aoki was one of the few non-Black members of the Black Panther Party and was the only Asian American appointed to the rank of Field Marshal.[3]

After his time with the Black Panthers, Aoki went on to help found the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) at UC Berkeley in 1968, as well as the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State University.[3] AAPA promoted pan-Asian solidarity and adopted an explicitly anti-racist and anti-imperialist political platform. They supported the BPP, anti-war efforts, and Third World liberation struggles.[19]

Many AAPA members helped campaign with the JACL to repeal Title II of the McCarran Act, or the Internal Securities Act of 1950.[20] The law had previously allowed for the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and later provisions gave the government the power to detain American citizens in the name of national security.[21] AAPA members spoke out about how these laws could be used in the same way against Black radical activists as they had been used against Japanese Americans.[19] They called for the law’s repeal at Free Huey rallies and saw both issues as connected in their broader support for multiracial alliances and non-white liberation movements.[12][19]

Other Asian American organizations also modeled themselves after the Black Panther Party's platform and ideas. The Red Guard Party emerged in 1969 out of a non-profit community youth program in San Francisco’s Chinatown.[19][22] Many Chinese American youth resonated with the BPP’s stance against police brutality, poverty, and racism.[22] After BPP leaders Bobby Seale and David Hillard visited the Leeway pool hall, they invited the youth to study revolutionary writings by Frantz Fanon, Mao Tse-Tung, and Che Guevara, and encouraged them to build their own revolutionary organization.[22] The organization disbanded in 1971, and many members combined with I Wor Kuen (IWK), the first national Asian American socialist organization.[19][22]

Joint Campaigns and Solidarity Actions

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The Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) played a pivotal role in creating multiracial coalitions through its involvement in the Third World Liberation Front strikes of 1968-1969. The strikes were held at San Francisco State College and the University of California, Berkeley, and were joint efforts between student organizations representing Black, Asian, and other marginalized communities. At UC Berkeley, AAPA alongside the Black Student Union, Mexican American Student Confederation and other cultural organizations demanded a Third World College and the creation of ethnic studies programs. This coalition of students emphasized the shared struggles between colonized and marginalized people and called for their universities to reflect their histories, cultures, and political realities.[23]

AAPA’s participation in the TWLF was one of the main reasons AAPA’s influence spread so far. Richard Aoki, who was a founding member of the AAPA and a former member of the Black Panther Party, played a pivotal role in bridging the gaps between Asian American and Black radical organizing, not just on campus, but on the streets as well.[24] AAPA saw the demands for an ethnic studies program as a part of a broader global struggle against imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. [24] A person only described as an individual in Umemoto’s article described what the movement meant to them “As Third World students, as Third World people, as so-called minorities, we are being exploited to the fullest extent in this racist white America, and we are therefore preparing ourselves and our people for a prolonged struggle for freedom from this yoke of oppression”. [23]

Alongside the campus organizing, AAPA played a crucial role in the mobilization effort against the Vietnam War. AAPA viewed US militarism abroad as an extension of the same racial and economic violence experienced by communities of color in the United States. Directed by shared values, AAPA worked in solidarity with other antiwar organizations including Asian Americans for Action (AAA) who condemned war because they viewed it as a genocide against the Vietnamese people and a domestic tool for silencing dissent. [24]

AAPA members marched in massive anti war demonstrations, had teach-ins, and published statements stating their opposition to US intervention in Southeast Asia. These efforts were influenced by a broader Third World internationalism that connected the Vietnamese struggle to other global liberation movements in Latin America, Africa, etc.[25]The famous slogan “Stop the War at Home and Abroad” encapsulated the interconnected nature of their activism, and challenged US foreign policy and racial capitalism. This antiwar activism was especially significant for Asian Americans, as they sought to reject the image of the “model minority” and instead position themselves in solidarity with the people of Vietnam and against the military-industrial complex.[25]

The radical politics through the TWLF strikes and antiwar mobilizations laid the groundwork for broader coalition work with marginalized movements. As these coalitions evolved, AAPA articulated a shared Third World Platform that included demands for land justice, and economic equity across racial and ethnic lines. These connections were not incidental, they reflected a recognition that the liberation of Asian Americans was deeply tied to the freedom of all oppressed peoples. [25]

BLM & Asian-American Solidarity

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Continuing the legacy of the Asian American Political Alliance’s (AAPA) solidarity with the Black Panther Party in the 1960s to fight against racialized state repression, Asian Americans found themselves once again at the forefront of the antiracist movement in 2020. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Asian Americans defied stereotypes, proving once again that they are not a passive and apolitical demographic.[26] As the nation underwent a racial reckoning[27] after George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed in broad daylight by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, a pan-racial alliance came out to protest racialized police violence, systemic racism, and show solidarity with Black Americans.[27] A poll in 2020 even showed that aside from Black Americans, Asian Americans were the most supportive racial group for the ongoing protests and anti racism efforts.[26] The local Hmong felt some divide, as one of the bystanding officers in George Floyd's death was Hmong-American.[5] Some members sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement because they felt as if Hmong-Americans had a similar experience as Black Americans, while others chose to support the officer.[5]

Building on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, notably the fight for desegregation and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Asian Americans found inspiration to unite with the Black community and challenge racism in their own lives. In 2020, this legacy of cross-racial solidarity saw a strong revival. Once a phrase in the 1960s in reference to the Civil Rights movement, the words “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” resurfaced during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 in support for George Floyd, and all of the unarmed black men who had been killed by police officers in the past decade.[28] Based in Seattle, Chinese and Taiwanese artist, Monyee Chau, attempted to repopularize this slogan by creating a poster with the phrase, surrounded by hashtags such as #blacklivesmatter and #asians4blacklives.[29] This was meant to rally the new generation of Asian youth to support the struggles of Black Americans, just as they did in the 1960s. Despite not being directly affected by George Floyd’s death, the Asian American protesters who displayed this sign felt the need to stand in solidarity with their fellow American racial minorities, and use their privilege to advocate for the more underprivileged.[28] One resident of Kansas City who referenced “Yellow Peril” attributed their support by saying they wanted to “align themselves with and support the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.”[28] This movement was not confined to any singular part of America, and there was a lot of Asian solidarity seen in the Bay Area, where some protesters were seen displaying signs that read “Asians 4 Black Lives.”[30]

In Chicago, a major hub for both Asian American and Black American communities.[31] Asian Americans joined the Black Lives Matter protests.[32] Organized between the Chinese Christian Union Church and the Progressive Baptist Church, a historically Black church, the two groups came together to organize a rally in support of George Floyd and racial justice.[32] Asian Americans here felt they could sympathize with anti-Black racism because of the anti-Asian racism that was rampant during the COVID 19 pandemic.[32] Similar to the recent racial oppression that each group faced, this was also a display of solidarity through faith, to show members of each group that Asian Americans and Black Americans had more in common, and they should not be pitted against each other like they historically have been.[32]

In South Sacramento, strong Afro-Asian solidarity emerged when police shot unarmed Black man Stephon Clark in 2018[33]. One reason was because this was in nearby Sacramento’s “Little Saigon” area[33], but also due to the fact that Asian Americans in South Sacramento share a lot of common struggles with the Black community there too, including over-policing, mass incarceration, and gang violence. This led to local members of both the Black and Asian community forming marches and street blockades as they called for justice.[33]

2018 saw the shooting of Akai Gurley, an unarmed Black man, by Peter Liang, a Chinese American NYPD officer, which became a notable event that revealed dynamics between Asian American and Black communities.[7] The case highlighted a divide within the Asian American community, where some people supported Liang, questioning his prosecution compared to white officers in similar cases and suggesting he was a "scapegoat".[7] On the other hand, other Asian American activists allied with the Black Lives Matter movement and Gurley's family, advocating for police accountability and emphasizing the cross-racial struggle for justice. This event also spurred discussions surrounding anti-Black sentiment within some Asian American communities and caused others to display their commitment to inter-community solidarity. [7]

Everybody's Bookstore

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A lasting example of AAPA’s legacy on the Asian American Movement even after its disbanding and the influence that Black Power had on the movement was Everybody's Bookstore. Established on January 1, 1970 on 840 Kearny Street in the same building as the International Hotel in San Francisco's Manilatown-Chinatown, Everybody’s Bookstore was one of the first Asian American bookstores in the country.[6][34] It served as a central hub of Asian culture, community, and educational resources for the Asian American community.[34] Many of the bookstore’s founders were former members of the AAPA at UC Berkeley, and participants in the Third World Liberation Front's strike at the campus, which demanded the establishment of ethnic studies departments under the control of minorities.[34][35] The idea for Everybody's Bookstore was conceived when former AAPA members discussed implementing a way for community members to learn their history and the roles they could play in social change, a vision based on the first point of the Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Program. The name of the bookstore was intended to draw in large numbers of common people, especially those who were curious to learn about Asian American, revolutionary, and radical social topics.[34]

Books related to Asian American history, Chinese revolutionary politics, and radical social activism from the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Macau were available at the bookstore.[6] It also included newspapers from other social movements, such as Black Panther Party News. Some of the most notable literature sold by Everybody's Bookstore were magazines and books from China which discussed political theory and events that were still relatively unknown in the United States, such as the ideology behind the Cultural Revolution.[34]

Ideas from the Black Panther Party and the broader Black Power Movement played a significant role in shaping the purpose of Everybody's Bookstore. One of the bookstore’s goals was to create autonomous institutions independently reliant from the state in order to serve its community through providing access to education on revolutionary political theory, Marxism-Leninism, and Black revolutionary thought, reflecting the Black Power and AAPA ideal that communities ought to have sovereignty over their own social, political, and economic institutions.[4] According to bookstore co-founder and future owner Harvey Dong, one vision of the store was to bring attention to different ethnic studies so that various social movements could learn from one another.[6] Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale once met with a group of Southeast Asian refugee students at Eastwind Books and Arts, the store location’s successor, to promote his book Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, showcasing the culture of solidarity the bookstore fostered.[36] More than just being a shopping location, Everybody’s Bookstore reflected AAPA and the Panthers’ vision of broad, inclusive, community grassroots activism.[37]

Everybody's Bookstore was operated by the Asian American Studies program at UC Berkeley, using the street location as its field office. After the disbanding of AAPA, the location was renamed to the Asian Community Center (ACC), which consisted of current and former students as well as new recruits of the community, soon began various "serve the people" programs, similar to the community services of the Black Panthers. Among these were food distribution, screenings for tuberculosis, and an elementary educational summer-day camp.[34]

References

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  1. ^ Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. (2001). "Yellow Power: The Formation of Asian-American Nationalism in the Age of Black Power, 1966-1975". Souls. 3 (3): 29–38. doi:10.1080/10999949.2001.12098172. ISSN 1099-9949.
  2. ^ a b c d e f "Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X". www.mcny.org. Retrieved 2025-06-03.
  3. ^ a b c d e Fujino, Diane C. (2012). Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life. University of Minnesota Press. doi:10.5749/j.ctttt7vd. ISBN 978-0-8166-7787-0. JSTOR 10.5749/j.ctttt7vd.
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  5. ^ a b c Westerman, Ashley (2020-06-04). "For One Immigrant Community, George Floyd's Death Isn't Just About Black And White". NPR. Retrieved 2025-05-30.
  6. ^ a b c d "Iconic Bookstore Closes, But The Community It Helped Build Lives On : Consider This from NPR". NPR. 2023-05-02. Retrieved 2025-05-15.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r "The Passionate Harlem Activist Yuri Kochiyama, New York, 1921 – 2014 (Video)". Harlem World. July 7, 2020.
  8. ^ a b c d e f "Yuri Kochiyama (U.S. National Park Service)". www.nps.gov. Retrieved 2025-06-03.
  9. ^ Wang, Hansi Lo (2013-08-19). "Not Just A 'Black Thing': An Asian-American's Bond With Malcolm X". NPR. Retrieved 2025-06-03.
  10. ^ a b c d e f Rose, Shari (2022-01-28). "Yuri Kochiyama At The Intersection of Black Power & Asian Movements". Blurred Bylines | SEO + Stories by Shari Rose. Retrieved 2025-06-03.
  11. ^ Burnett, Lucy (2009-06-21). "Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) 1965". BlackPast.org. Retrieved 2025-06-03.
  12. ^ a b c d Fujino, Diane C. Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005
  13. ^ Aliano, Kelly. "Life Story: Yuri Kochiyama - Women & the American Story". wams.nyhistory.org. Archived from the original on 2025-05-16. Retrieved 2025-06-03.
  14. ^ "Toward a Sociogenic Understanding of Reparations: An Analysis of Japanese American Reparations and Yuri Kochiyama's Revolutionary Praxis | Pritish Das | – The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History". Retrieved 2025-06-03.
  15. ^ "Black Panther Party | History, Ideology, & Facts | Britannica". www.britannica.com. 2025-05-11. Retrieved 2025-06-01.
  16. ^ "The Black Panther Party". National Archives. 2016-08-25. Retrieved 2025-06-01.
  17. ^ Harris, Jessica C. (2001). "Revolutionary Black Nationalism: The Black Panther Party". The Journal of Negro History. 86 (3): 409–421. doi:10.2307/1562458. ISSN 0022-2992.
  18. ^ Seale, Bobby (1991). Seize the time. The story of the Black Panther party and Huey P. Newton. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. ISBN 978-0-933121-30-0.
  19. ^ a b c d e Fujino, Diane (2024). "Political Asian America". Ethnic Studies Review. 47 (1): 60–97. doi:10.1525/esr.2024.47.1.60. ISSN 2576-2915.
  20. ^ Izumi, Masumi (2005). "Prohibiting "American Concentration Camps"". Pacific Historical Review. 74 (2): 165–194. doi:10.1525/phr.2005.74.2.165. ISSN 0030-8684.
  21. ^ "Repeal of Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950 ("Emergency Detention Act") | Densho Encyclopedia". encyclopedia.densho.org. Archived from the original on 2025-03-16. Retrieved 2025-06-02.
  22. ^ a b c d Daryl J. Maeda, “Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972. American Quarterly 57:4 (2005), 1079-1103.
  23. ^ a b Umemoto, Karen (January 1989). ""On Strike!" San Francisco State College Strike, 1968–69: The Role of Asian American Students". Amerasia Journal. 15 (1): 3–41. doi:10.17953/amer.15.1.7213030j5644rx25. ISSN 0044-7471.
  24. ^ a b c "The Vietnam War – A Creative's Guide to Asian American Media Studies". blogs.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2025-06-03.
  25. ^ a b c Sullivan, Hannah (2018). "How Yeats Learned to Scan". Yeats Annual (21): 3–37. ISSN 0278-7687.
  26. ^ a b "One Korean American's Reckoning : Code Switch". NPR. 2020-07-29. Retrieved 2025-05-15.
  27. ^ a b Hurst, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Kiana Cox and Kiley (2025-05-07). "Views of Race, Policing and Black Lives Matter in the 5 Years Since George Floyd's Killing". Pew Research Center. Retrieved 2025-05-15.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  28. ^ a b c "Ethnic groups say supporting Black Lives Matter movement shows solidarity". KSHB 41 Kansas City News. 2020-06-06. Retrieved 2025-05-15.
  29. ^ "The history behind 'Yellow Peril Supports Black Power' and why some find it problematic". NBC News. 2020-06-11. Retrieved 2025-05-15.
  30. ^ "Caravan For Justice: Cars Offer Socially Distanced Protesting During Pandemic". NPR. Retrieved 2025-05-15.
  31. ^ "Population by Race and Ethnicity". dph.illinois.gov. Retrieved 2025-05-15.
  32. ^ a b c d "Asian American community marches from Chinatown to Bridgeport in support of Black lives". ABC7 Chicago. 2020-06-29. Retrieved 2025-05-15.
  33. ^ a b c Hope, Jeanelle K. (2019-05-04). "This Tree Needs Water!: A Case Study on the Radical Potential of Afro-Asian Solidarity in the Era of Black Lives Matter". Amerasia Journal. 45 (2): 222–237. doi:10.1080/00447471.2019.1684807. ISSN 0044-7471.
  34. ^ a b c d e f Dong, Harvey. "A Bookstore for Everybody." Chinese America : History and Perspectives, Suppl.Seizing the Moment: Twentieth-Century Chinese American ... (2009): 122-127,157. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/bookstore-everybody/docview/207436042/se-2.
  35. ^ Dong, Harvey. "The TWLF Strike." Manuel Ruben Delgado. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Nov. 2014. <"Twlfstrike1". Archived from the original on 2014-05-04. Retrieved 2014-11-14.>.
  36. ^ "A chapter ends for this historic Asian American bookstore, but its story continues". WAMU. Retrieved 2025-05-16.
  37. ^ "Asian American Movement 1968: Asian American Political Alliance 1968". Asian American Movement 1968. January 15, 2008. Retrieved December 7, 2016.
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