Draft:Penny Nakatsu: Difference between revisions

Penny Nakatsu (born in 1949) was a member of the 1968 San Francisco State University (SFSU) BSU-TWLF strike as well as a co-founder of SFSU's chapter of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA).

Early Life

Nakatsu is a Sansei, born in 1949 in Honolulu, Hawai'i. Her father was in the US Army Military Intelligence Service, and her mother was a war bride. The couple moved to San Francisco in either 1950 or 1951 with young Penny. Nakatsu grew up in San Francisco and came from the Western Addition neighborhood of the city, which includes the Fillmore and Japantown. Nakatsu attended a Catholic primary school called Morning Star near Japantown, which served mainly Asian American students. She later attended Aptos Junior High School and Lowell High School in San Francisco. Prior to graduating from Lowell High School, Nakatsu applied to only UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University (SFSU), deciding to attend the latter in favor of smaller classes and a more personal education. In 1967, Nakatsu began taking courses at San Francisco State University (then called San Francisco State College), pursuing a degree in Asian American studies. As a freshman, Nakatsu wrote a thesis on the McCarran-Walter Act of 1950, which authorized the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in the US.

Professional Life

After graduating from UC Berkeley Law School, Nakatsu was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1974, marking the start of her career as a civil rights lawyer. As an attorney, she worked in the larger East Bay Area region, including Berkeley, Hayward, and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. Upon retirement, Nakatsu worked as a multi-faith hospital chaplain.

Activism

In spring of 1968, Nakatsu engaged in her first political action on campus by participating in a sit-in to protest the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) on campus, as well as cutbacks made on the Special Admissions program at SFSU.

Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA)

After attending an AAPA meeting held by Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, Nakatsu and other Asian-American student activists decided to start their own chapter at SFSU in the fall of 1968. They secured anthropologist James Hirabayashi to serve as their faculty advisor, who later became the first dean of the first Ethnic Studies program in the U.S.

The SFSU chapter of AAPA was ideologically influenced by the UC Berkeley chapter, as Nakatsu and other founding members engaged in collective discussions to form the organization's goals. They recognized the hardships faced by Asians as a result of racism and imperialism, viewing political action as a vital aspect for combatting this oppression. SFSU's AAPA aimed to provide its members with a critical political study. Participants read the works of Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and other Black Power leaders. For Nakatsu, this study allowed her to build a conceptual framework by which she could connect her activism as a student to issues of inequity both domestically and internationally.

1968 SFSU BSU-TWLF Strike

In 1968, SFSU's Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front coalition enacted the largest student strike in U.S. history to date, lasting five months (from Nov. 6, 1968 to Mar. 20, 1969). Penny Nakatsu, as a representative for SFSU's AAPA chapter and a member of the Third World Liberation Front, participated in the Third World Liberation Front strikes of 1968, which resulted in the creation of the College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S..

The goal of the BSU-TWLF Strike was to construct an ethnic studies into a respectable and viable curriculum to not only attract more Third-World, disadvantaged perspectives, but to create space within Eurocentric institutions. The strike came to an end in March of 1969 with a settlement promising a School of Ethnic Studies, the curriculum of which AAPA and other liberation groups were tasked with creating. Nakatsu and others involved in the strike had only weeks to build the structure of the Ethnic Studies Department to supplement BSU courses. The groups struggled to find materials to supplement classes with, but largely created original information to teach in the new department.

Black Liberation & Black-Asian Solidarities

In 1969, Nakatsu sat on a panel of female activists at a Black Panther Party convention in Oakland, held the weekend of July 18-21. The conference, called the "United Front Against Fascism" (UFAF), hosted the panel named "Women Speak Out Against Fascism".

Nakatsu's speech discussed the 1942 Executive Order by President Roosevelt (E.0. 9066), which ordered the incarceration of 125,000 Japanese-Americans, and the impact of growing up in these "concentration camps", as Nakatsu refers to them. She locates the incarceration of Japanese-American citizens as a precedent for the incarceration of political dissidents.