Image via Complex Original
Where are all the Asian-American activists? They've been here this entire time.
The community, which frequently fends off racistjokes, 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.
1. Iqbal Ahmad
Considered the “most original anti-imperialist analyst of Asia and Africa” by late, preeminent cultural critic Edward Said, Pakistani journalist Iqbal Ahmad uncovered oppression around the world. Ahmad joined Frantz Fanon and the National Liberation Front in Algeria during the early 1960s, and while earning his PhD at Princeton, he was one of the first fellows at the Washington Institute of Policy Studies. Due to his anti-war views, Ahmad and a group of Catholic activists were indicted in 1971 for plotting to kidnap then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger; the case resulted in a mistrial. Before his death in 1999, Ahmad helped open a Pakistani university and taught at various American institutions, including Cornell University. The Eqbal Admad Centre for Public Education was created in his honor.
2. Richard Aoki
San Leandro, California, native Richard Aoki joined black national organization the Black Panthers in1967, 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 theVietnam Day Committee and Oakland-Berkeley branch of the Socialist Workers Party. Aoki also helped lead the historical 1969Third 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 stillmaintained the support of surviving activist friends.
3. Grace Lee Boggs
After earning her PhD from Bryn Mawr College, Grace Lee Boggs married her future partner in activism, James Boggs. As the daughter of Chinese immigrants, she focused on alleviating poverty within Detroit’s poor and black communities. She was passionate about community-based revolution, and reportedly offer Malcolm X a place to stay whenever he visited Detroit. Boggs also collaborated with socialist theorist, C.L.R. James, and helped organize the 1963 Detroit “Walk to Freedom,” headlined by Martin Luther King, Jr. Her activities were regularly monitored by the FBI, but Boggs continued her activism until she died in October 2015, at 100 years old.
4. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
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.
5. Noriko Sawada Bridges Flynn
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 detaineesresettle 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.
6. Larry Itliong
Chicano activist Cesar Chavez is often credited with spearheading the farm laborers’ movement, but Larry Itliong led the firstDelano 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 Californiabill that marked Oct. 25 as Larry Itliong Day.
7. Lala Lajpat Rai
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 organizationIndia Home Rule League of America. During his five-year stay in the U.S., he became close to historianW.E.B. Du Bois; both intellectuals influenced each other, as they explored the connection between Indian sovereignty and the Civil Rights Movements. Rai was alsothought 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).
8. Yuri Kochiyama
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 seencupping the activist’s head after his assassination in 1965. As a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, Kochiyama alsosupported 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 theCivil 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.
