Richard Aoki in the 1960s
Several memorials to honor and celebrate the life of Richard Aoki, founding member of the Black Panther Party, will be held this weekend in Berkeley and in Oakland (see below). Mr. Aoki died last month at age 71.
Richard Aoki was born in San Leandro in 1938. He helped fight for and create the Ethnic studies program at UC Berkeley and he was a teacher, counselor and administrator for many years in the Peralta College District. But he will probably be most remembered for the important part he played in the revolutionary movement of the 1960s.
How did this Japanese American become a revolutionary?
There is a fine interview in the book Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America which tells his story in Aoki’s own frank words and humorous style.
Richard Aoki was four years old when his family was uprooted and incarcerated in a “relocation camp” in Topaz, Utah for Japanese Americans during World War II. The word “relocation” was a federal ephemism, Aoki’s family was among the 120,000 people who were stripped of their property and rights, taking only what they could carry. Aoki attended kindergarten and the first years of elementary school imprisoned in barracks surrounded with barb wire: isolated in the middle of a desert. As Aoki recalled, “It was not a happy camp.”
Four years later his family “was abruptly jerked from the concentration camp and relocated to a Black ghetto which was West Oakland.” Though he at first felt like an outsider he maintained that “immersion in the African American culture totally, was one of the best things that ever happened to me.” He observed segregation and racism up close. After a rocky start, he made friends, went to school and “even ran in a street gang called The Saints that was made up of Black kids, several other Asians, two white kids that lived on the block, who were poor whites. Both of them have ended up in prison. Friendships I made there in West Oakland stood up over the last 40 and 50 years.”
The experience in the camps, and growing up in the Black community shaped Aoki’s being. He further awoke to politics during his stint in the army. He began to question the U.S. growing involvement in Vietnam. Back on the streets as a civilian in Oakland he attended his first anti-war demonstration in 1964 and was exposed to all kinds of political groups. He started to read books by Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Franz Fanon. While attending Merritt College in Oakland where he hooked up with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. But politics was not the only thing on their minds, the streets also called, and if the times had been different, or they had made different choices, the Black Panther Party might never have been formed.
–Check this site for part two of this story
Below is a schedule for this weekend’s memorials:
A Celebration of the Life and Times of Richard Aoki
May 2, 2009, Saturday
1-4 pm
Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley Campus
Free & public invited.
Featuring: Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party and friend and
colleagues in AAPA and TWLF
Video: "Tribute to Richard Aoki" by TWF Films
Reception afterward at Multicultural Student Center
Co-sponsored by Asian American Studies/Ethnic Studies Dept., UCB.
Ethnic Studies Undergraduate Collectiva, Multicultural Center
Outdoor Community Remembrance & Celebration
May 3, 2009 Sunday
11am-1pm
Lil' Bobby Hutton (DeFremery) Park
1651 Adeline St. (near 18th Street), Oakland
Free & public invited.
Community readings of short writings and poems dedicated to life of
Richard Aoki.
Co-sponsored by EastSide Arts Alliance, Serve the People, Black
August Organizing Committee, It's About Time/Black Panther Party
Alumni Committee
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