Forty years ago this week, over 250,000 people (including my father and myself) came to Washington to join Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others who were calling for jobs and equality for African Americans. Contrary to the misperception that Asian Pacific Americans were not involved in the civil rights struggles of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, APAs contributed to the growth of civil rights and civil liberties in this country even before the rise of the Asian Pacific American movement in the late 1960s.
I hope students and historians will do more to document the civil rights struggles of pioneers such as New York-based sociologist Dr. Setsuko Nishi (who worked with Dr. Kenneth Clark, a strategist for the Brown v. Board case), Philadelphia attorney and judge William Marutani (who went south in 1963 as a “freedom rider”), author Eleanor Wong Telemaque (who worked for civil rights at the United States Commission on Civil Rights and in other venues) and artist Minn Matsuda (who just passed away in New York after spending a lifetime fighting injustice).
Over the next 20 years, Dr. King’s galvanizing “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963 became a rallying cry for African Americans, APAs and all people of good will. Significant progress was made in education, employment, housing and other aspects of American society.
By 1983, a twentieth anniversary commemoration was held here in Washington, and another 250,000 attended the day’s activities. Among the participants were Ruthann Kurose and Kathy Halley, who were legislative aides to Rep. Mike Lowry at the time. Lowry, a Seattle-based Democrat and later governor of Washington State, was involved in anti-apartheid struggles and had introduced a Japanese American redress bill in 1979, so Kurose and Halley were very familiar with both APA and other civil rights issues at that time.
Kurose, in Washington with husband Nathan and children Mika and Mori last weekend to attend the 40th anniversary activities said, “What was striking about the rally in 1983, was the diversity of people and issues. Immigration reform was a big issue for APAs in 1983, and many of us came to the rally to keep that issue on the front burner of the civil rights agenda.”
Last weekend’s rally, by comparison, did not have many APAs in attendance, and the total crowd was estimated at only 2,000 by some attendees.
“I was glad to see the voter registration efforts by Operation BigVote (www.bigvote.org) and others reaching out to minority youth at this 40th anniversary event, but I was concerned about the overall lack of attendance,” said Kurose. “In Seattle we always have big crowds at events such as these and they are always quite diverse. I hope that APAs and other Americans do not think that the struggle for equality and justice is completed.”
As if to answer her concern, APA organizers are gearing up to recapture another milestone in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s: the freedom rides that challenged segregation on interstate buses. First conceived in 1947 when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) organized an interracial bus ride across state lines to test a Supreme Court decision declaring segregation on interstate buses unconstitutional, the freedom rides that began in 1961 were a courageous attempt to draw attention to a major injustice.
Likewise, today’s immigrant rights activists have charted a visionary and courageous Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride to highlight the continuing injustices faced by immigrant workers. Despite paying far more in taxes than they receive in social services, today’s immigrants are vilified for allegedly taking jobs, and are denied the full protection of the law. Unable to organize without fear of reprisal, unable to reunite with families and unable to navigate a clear path to citizenship, they face hurdles when we instead should be welcoming them. APA immigrants, for example, have been cited as key factors in revitalizing downtowns in many cities, and immigrants of all backgrounds perform cleaning, gardening and other tasks that keep our businesses and communities functioning.
The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride will set out from nine major cities and cross the country in buses in late September. They will converge on Washington, D.C. to meet Congress members, and then travel to Liberty State Park in New Jersey Oct. 3, and then Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, New York for a mass rally on Oct. 4. (www.iwfr.org)
I hope that all of us who have kept Dr. King’s dream alive these past four decades will participate in the freedom rides of 2003 in some way.