8 Asian-American activists down with the cause

Where are all the Asian-American activists? They've been here this entire time. 

The community, which frequently fends off racist jokes, unfair expectations of being the "model minority," and accusations that it's made up of lousy allies, is often excluded from national conversations surrounding race and social justice. Yet, history tells a different story about Asian America's rich activism and intercultural solidarity—much of it inspired by the civil rights movement.

From South Asia to California, here are eight Asian Americans who helped change America for the better, and fought the power on their own terms.

San Leandro, California, native Richard Aoki joined black national organization the Black Panthers in 1967, supplying them with some of their first firearms to defend against police brutality in Oakland. He committed to anti-war activism through his work with the Vietnam Day Committee and Oakland-Berkeley branch of the Socialist Workers Party. Aoki also helped lead the historical 1969 Third World Liberation Front Strike at University of California, Berkeley, which resulted in the formation of the college’s Department of Ethnic Studies. He was an educator in his later years and before committing suicide in 2009, Aoki rejected claims by a former FBI agent that he worked as an informant, and still maintained the support of surviving activist friends.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was one of several Indian-born social reformers who saw parallels between British colonial rule in India and racism against black people in the United States. During her visit to the U.S. in 1941, she identified as a “colored woman,” spoke out against discrimination, and only stayed with black families in an act of racial solidarity. Chattopadhyay was also invested in the arts, and spent her life fighting for feminism and sovereignty for all colonized people worldwide. She published some 20 books by the time of her death in 1988. She was 85.

As the first-generation daughter of Japanese immigrants, Noriko Sawada Bridges Flynn spent three years in an Arizona internment camp with her family. After her release, she helped other former detainees resettle through the War Relocation Authority, and became politically active with the Berkeley Interracial Committee. Nine years before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban on interracial marriage in the Loving v. Virginia case, Flynn and her first husband Harry Bridges challenged anti-miscegenation laws preventing white-Asian marriages in Nevada; following a media storm, they successfully married in 1958. Flynn’s work within the Japanese-American community won her widespread recognition and accolades. She died in 2003.

Chicano activist Cesar Chavez is often credited with spearheading the farm laborers’ movement, but Larry Itliong led the first Delano Grape Strike in 1965 to protest the poor working conditions of grape pickers in the California Central Valley. Itliong his coworker, Philip Vera Cruz, later joined Chavez and Dolores Huerta to form the United Farm Workers, and successfully negotiated a raise in wages. Itliong was instrumental in uniting Chicano and Filipino laborers, and last year, nearly 40 years after his death, the activist was memorialized in a California bill that marked Oct. 25 as Larry Itliong Day.

Known as the “Lion of Punjab,” Punjabi Hindu independence leader Lala Lajpat Rai founded New York-based publication Young India in 1918, as well as the organization India Home Rule League of America. During his five-year stay in the U.S., he became close to historian W.E.B. Du Bois; both intellectuals influenced each other, as they explored the connection between Indian sovereignty and the Civil Rights Movements. Rai was also thought to have helped radicalize Du Bois in the struggle for the complete liberation—rather than integration—of black people. Du Bois’s novel, Dark Princess, was dedicated to Rai, who died from heart complications in 1928, two weeks after being beat by British police during a protest in Lahore (now in Pakistan).

Labeled a “Red Chinese agent” in FBI files from the 1960s, activist Yuri Kochiyama became interested in black nationalism after meeting Malcolm X in Harlem during the 1960s. She was famously seen cupping the activist’s head after his assassination in 1965. As a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, Kochiyama also supported a wide variety of social justice movements such as anti-apartheid in South Africa and Puerto Rican independence. Formerly interned during World War II, Kochiyama successfully helped fight U.S. Congress to pass the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which granted $20,000 dollars in reparations to each of the estimated 60,000 surviving Japanese detainees. She died in 2014 when she was 93 years old.