Questions/Goals for this Week:

1. What was the political genesis for the term "Asian American," now used widely today?
2. What were the goals of the Asian American Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, and how did it relate to the objectives of other movements of the time?

Required Reading:

• Omatsu, Glen. "The 'Four Prisons' and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s."
• Umemoto, Karen. "On Strike!” San Francisco State College Strike, 1968-69: The Role of Asian American Students."
• both uploaded

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For this module, we look at how the Asian American community developed in the social foment of the 1960s and 1970s. This is a time period that has received much attention in American history for a number of reasons: in traditional narratives, it's the culmination of the civil rights movement as reflected in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For many it's the association with Martin Luther King, Jr. and his fight for equality through non-violent means. In the backdrop of these actions in American though was of course international conflict in Vietnam as a part of America's Cold War policy to support anti-communist regimes abroad, even if those regimes themselves were implicated in the suppression of political speech, human rights violations, and other forms of authoritarian government.

While more and more Americans became concerned about the United States' campaigns abroad, there was also growing unrest within its domestic borders as well, especially when it came to the treatment of communities of color. The year 1968 was a significant milestone in that many groups became much more radicalized and vocal as a result of the political times… violence against established civil rights leaders (such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.), intransigence of states and local jurisdictions to adhere to federal law, and the escalation of conflict abroad.

In these tumultuous times, the readings offer a couple of perspectives from which to examine this period. First, Uyematsu's excerpt on "Yellow Power" is a primary source document from 1969, written from the perspective of Asian American activism. Uyematsu is critical of the perceived silence and passivity of post-wartime incarceration Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans — a trait that she grounds in the trauma of a uniquely American experience of subordination, and not a cultural characteristic of the Japanese (or other Asians) in general.

In the next article, scholar Karen Umemoto looks at very specific event in the Asian American Movement — the San Francisco State College Strike — and the role Asian Americans played in effecting change in their community. Finally, Omatsu looks at the Asian American Movement and its goals and provides some food for thought as to how this applied moving forward from the 1970s. While examining both these readings, consider what the Movement objectives were at that time period, and how some of those objectives have changed or shifted in the following decades.