William Wells Brown

William Wells Brown was born in bondage in 1814. Much of his childhood was spent working in St. Louis, Missouri. In one of his numerous attempts to escape, he and his mother were caught. She was shipped south to New Orleans and he never saw her again. Brown was finally able to escape on New Year’s Day in 1834. He went to Buffalo, NY, where he worked on steamboats and assisted in the work of the Underground Railroad.

In the 1840s, Brown joined the abolitionist movement, attending conventions, working on committees, and giving speeches. In 1847 he was hired by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society as a public speaker and moved to Boston. That same year he published his “Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave,” which was widely read and revered.

Due to the threat of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, he went to England for five years. After the end of the Civil War, Brown continued to write, publishing three volumes on Black history, a novel, travelogues, a play, and a collection of abolitionist songs. Before Brown passed away in 1884, he was regarded as the foremost Black writer in the United States. He also became a physician.

Learn more at the State Historical Society of Missouri.

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Paul Cuffee

No Taxation Without Representation!

On Feb. 10, 1780, Paul Cuffee and others petitioned the Massachusetts government either to give African and Native Americans the right to vote or to stop taxing them. The petition was denied, but the case helped pave the way for the 1783 Massachusetts Constitution, which gave equal rights and privileges to all (male) citizens of the state.

Here is an excerpt from the transcript of the petition submitted to the Mass. legislature:

Written by hand is:

Read more on Infoplease.com. Read more about Cuffee on BlackPast.org.

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Luís Gama

Luís Gama (June 21, 1830—August 24, 1882) abolitionist, journalist, lawyer, and poet. Gama was born in Salvador, Brazil in 1830, his biological father a wealthy Portuguese man and his mother, Luisa Mahin, a revolutionary Black woman from Ghana. Mahin played a major role in a number of slave uprisings, including the Malê Revolt.

At the age of 10, Gama’s father sold him into slavery. In 1848, Gama escaped his enslavement and was able to win his legal freedom after proving to a court that he was born free. As noted on the AfroEurope International blog, “Gama published a collection of poems, mocking Pardos (mixed race) who wanted to be white and sold out their Black brother and sisters by denying their roots so they could join the elite.”

Gama gained a reputation in Brazil as a Rabula, or a lawyer without a law degree who represented people who were enslaved against their “masters.” By the end of his life, he had helped to free upwards of 1,000 enslaved people and become one of Brazil’s most prominent abolitionists and revolutionaries.

Read much more about Gama’s life at the AfroEurope International blog.

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William Howard Day

Attorney, newspaper editor, minister, and abolitionist William Howard Day traveled to Britain in 1859 where he lobbied for a boycott of cotton from the U.S. to break the economic profitability of human bondage. Read a report on those talks from the Black Abolitionist Archive.

On July 4, 1865, he gave a speech on the White House grounds to thousands of people including African Americans recently freed from bondage, congressmen, and government officials. Day reminded those assembled that “the Declaration of Independence is not yet fully carried out, nor will it be, until . . . the Black man, as well as the white, is permitted to enjoy all the franchises pertaining to citizens of the United States of America.” Day later worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Learn more at the Colored Conventions Project.

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Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, orator, writer, newspaperman, and statesman, selected February 14 to mark the day of his birth, 1818. Here is a free downloadable lesson for teaching about Douglass’ fight for freedom and a video clip of Danny Glover reading his July 4 speech.

Given the breadth of Douglass’s scholarship and activism, he is also included in other lessons on the Zinn Education Project website such as the role plays on the Seneca Falls Convention and the U.S.-Mexico War, see these and more here.

On Dec. 3, 1847, Frederick Douglass, along with Martin R. Delany, started the North Star (newspaper). Here is an excerpt from the paper on the War with Mexico (from Voices of a People’s History of the United States) read by Benjamin Bratt and a related lesson. We also recommend the book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.

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Henry Highland Garnet

Henry Highland Garnet was born in captivity in Maryland in 1815. When he was nine, his family secured their freedom via the Underground Railroad. Garnet entered the African Free School in New York City in 1826.

In 1834, Garnet and some of his classmates formed their own club, the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association. Because the society was named after a controversial abolitionist, the public school where the group wanted to meet insisted that the group first change their name. To do otherwise would be to risk mob violence. The club decided to keep their name and instead change their venue. The first meeting of the group garnered over 150 African Americans under 20.

Garnet is perhaps most famous for his radical speech of 1843, “An Address to the Slaves of the USA.” In this speech, Garnet speaks directly to those enslaved, urging them to rebel against their masters.

Because of Garnet’s outspoken views and national reputation, he was a prime target during the 1863 New York City draft riots. Rioters mobbed the street where Garnet lived and called for him by name. Fortunately several neighbors helped to conceal Garnet and his family. Garnet was also involved in the fight to desegregate streetcars.

This description is from The New York African Free School Collection. Read more here and here. Photo from National Portrait Gallery.

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Leonard Grimes

Leonard Grimes (1815-1873), born in Virginia, was an abolitionist and pastor who played an active role on the Underground Railroad. After witnessing the horrors of slavery as a young man, Grimes determined to do all he could to help people escape.

He got a job as a hackman (horses and carriages for hire) to provide cover for his work on the Underground Railroad. In 1839 he was arrested in Washington, D.C. (yes, our nation’s capitol) for transporting a family to freedom and sent to Virginia, where he was sentenced to two years of hard labor in the Richmond penitentiary.

After his release, he and his family moved to Boston, where he became the first pastor of Twelfth Baptist Church, known as The Fugitives Church. There he continued his abolitionist work and open defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. He was credited with helping hundreds of freedom seekers make their way to Canada. [Description adapted from Cultural Tourism DC.]

We highly recommend this short essay about his life by Deborah A. Lee.

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Charlotte Forten Grimké

Abolitionist and educator Charlotte Forten Grimké was the granddaughter of Philadelphia abolitionist James Forten. She was active in the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. After the start of the Civil War, Forten taught a community of African Americans living on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina who had been liberated in 1862. She wrote about the experience in her article “Life on the Sea Islands,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864.

Read more at BlackPast.org.

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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1825. After teaching in Pennsylvania and Ohio for two years, she traveled the U.S. speaking on the abolitionist circuit and assisting in the Underground Railroad. In addition, Harper was a prolific and celebrated writer. Throughout her life she published numerous collections of poetry, including Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects and Sketches of Southern Life. In short time, Harper became the most celebrated female African American writer in the United States. Here is an excerpt from a poem she wrote about slavery:

And mothers stood with streaming eyes
And saw their dear children sold
Unheeded rise their bitter cries,
While tyrants bartered them for gold.

After the end of the Civil War, Watkins supported the advancement of civil rights for African Americans, women’s rights, and equality in education for all. Read more at the Archives of Maryland and ExplorePAHistory.com. Image source: New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

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Lewis Hayden

Lewis Hayden was born in bondage in 1811 in Lexington, Kentucky. His first wife and son were sold by U.S. Senator Henry Clay into the deep south and Hayden never saw them again. He married Harriet Bell in 1840. The couple escaped on the Underground Railroad in 1844, fleeing to Canada before they made their way to Boston. (The two abolitionists who assisted Hayden’s escape were arrested and jailed.)

In Massachusetts, Hayden and his family ran a clothing store where they held abolitionist meetings and provided refuge for people escaping from slavery. It was rumored that the Haydens’ stored two kegs of gunpowder in their home in the case that slave catchers would ever attempt to capture the people they sheltered —- they’d have rather blown up the house than surrender the persons they were protecting.

Hayden assisted high profile people including Ellen and William Craft, Shadrach Minkins, and Anthony Burns. Additionally, Hayden raised funds for John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry Raid. During the Civil War Hayden helped recruit Black soldiers and later served a term in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He worked for a monument to honor Crispus Attucks and supported women’s suffrage.

Hayden passed away in 1889. On Harriet Hayden’s death, she bequeathed funds to form a scholarship for African American students at Harvard Medical School.

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Josiah Henson

Born into slavery in 1789 in Maryland, Josiah Henson fled to Canada with his family where he founded the Dawn Institute, a settlement house which taught trades to people who had escaped enslavement. A Methodist preacher, he traveled throughout the United States and Great Britain lecturing against slavery. With the underground railroad he assisted over two hundred people in their flight to Canada. [Description from the National Park Service.]

Henson’s description of his experiences, an early slave narrative, served as the basis for the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Read more about Josiah Henson at the Documenting the American South website.

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Paul Jennings

Paul Jennings (1799 – 1874) was held in bondage by President James Madison during and after his White House years. After securing his freedom in 1845, Jennings published the first White House memoir. His book, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, is described as “a singular document in the history of slavery and the early American republic.” Read excerpts at Documenting the American South.

Jennings also played a lead role in planning the Pearl incident “the largest recorded escape attempted by people from enslavement in U.S. history.” Read more at the Zinn Education Project.

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John Mercer Langston

“It has been discovered, at last, that slavery is no respecter of persons, that in its far reaching and broad sweep it strikes down alike the freedom of the Black man and the freedom of the white one. This movement can no longer be regarded as a sectional one. . . it must be evident to every one conversant with American affairs that we are now realizing in our national experience the important and solemn truth of history, that the enslavement and degradation of one portion of the population fastens galling festering chains upon the limbs of the other. For a time these chains may be invisible; yet they are iron-linked and strong; and the slave power, becoming strong-handed and defiant, will make them felt.”

John Mercer Langston (abolitionist, politician, and attorney) in a speech delivered in August of 1858. Read full speech at the The Oberlin-Wellington Rescue website.

Read Langston’s bio at BlackPast.org. Photo from Brady-Handy Collection at the Library of Congress.

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Robert Morris

Robert Morris (June 8, 1823 – Dec. 12, 1882) was one of the first African American lawyers in the United States.

He was one of the abolitionists who helped Shadrach Minkins escape from the courthouse on Feb. 15, 1851, where he had been brought under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Morris was tried and acquitted for his role in the Minkins escape. Morris was also one of the attorneys for Benjamin Roberts who filed the first school integration suit on Feb. 15, 1848 (Roberts v. Boston) after Roberts’ daughter Sarah was barred from a white school in Boston, Mass. Read more in the book Sarah’s Long Walk (Beacon Press) and at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Read more about Robert Morris at BlackPast.org and at Boston College Law School. Photo in public domain.

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William Cooper Nell

William Cooper Nell, African-American abolitionist, journalist, author, and civil servant was born on December 16, 1816. Nell was one of the first people to record extensive African American history (a people’s historian!) and an activist for school desegregation in Boston. Read more on BlackPast.org.

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Solomon Northup

Solomon Northup was born free in upstate New York in 1808. The story of his enslavement was told in his book 12 Years a Slave and has been made into films by Gordon Parks (1984) and Steve McQueen (2013). His book and the movie tell the story of Northup’s enslavement for twelve years on plantations in Louisiana before he was able to regain his freedom.

Missing from the film was his abolitionist activity after his emancipation. Northup wrote his book to expose the brutal conditions of enslavement and he spoke across the U.S. His campaign for reparations, supported by Frederick Douglass and Free Soil Party U.S. Congressman Gerrit Smith, was a precursor to the national reparations campaign for all African Americans. Read “We Need to Include Reparations in the Story of Solomon Northup.”

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Oberlin-Wellington Rescuers

On September 13, 1858, group of the citizens of Oberlin, Ohio, stopped Kentucky “slave-catchers” from kidnapping John Price. Oberlinians, Black and white, from town and from the local College, pursued the kidnappers to nearby Wellington at word of his abduction. Read more about the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue.

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Sarah Parker Remond

Born into a family of abolitionists who were also active in the Underground Railroad, Sarah Parker Remond gave her first abolitionist speech at the age of sixteen. This was a radical action at the time not just because she was young and black, but also because she was a woman.

Remond was a member of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, in addition to other antislavery organizations. When Remond was 27 she refused to accept segregated seating at an event at Boston’s Howard Athenaeum. While being forcibly removed, Remond was pushed down a flight of stairs by a police officer. After taking the city of Boston to court she was awarded a settlement of $500 in a case that drew national attention. Remond traveled across the country as an abolitionist lecturer and also to England. She eventually moved to Italy and became a physician.

Read more at the BlackPast.org. Photo: © Peabody Essex Museum, 1865.

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Charles Lenox Remond

Charles Lenox Remond (1810-1873) joined the abolitionist movement while in his early twenties, working as an agent for Garrison’s Liberator in 1832 and later as a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. These experiences helped earn him a nomination as the only African American delegate to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.

During this conference and his subsequent United Kingdom lecture circuit, he developed a reputation as an eloquent orator, additionally demonstrating his commitment to women’s rights by protesting the conventions rejection of female delegates.

Upon his return to the United States, Remond labored not only to end slavery, but to improve the lives of free-Blacks in the north, lobbying the Massachusetts House of Representatives to end segregation on trains.

Biography from the Colored Conventions Project. Read more about Charles Lenox Remond at BlackPast.org. Photo from Boston Public Library.

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David Ruggles

“David Ruggles (1810-1849) was an abolitionist, editor, writer, organizer of the New York Committee of Vigilance and famed conductor of the Underground Railroad. He was renown for his unflinching courage in the battle against kidnappers and illicit traders of enslaved people. He was the first Black bookseller and operated the first Black lending library in the nation. His magazine, the Mirror of Liberty, was the first periodical published by an African American. . . . New York’s economy depended directly or indirectly on slavery. Mobs did not hesitate to attack abolitionists, especially one as provocative as Ruggles. His store was burned down three times; he was beaten in jail twice and once nearly kidnapped to be sold into slavery.”

Description by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, author of David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City. Read full interview and learn more about the book at the University of North Carolina Press website. Learn more about his work fighting the police in the Time article, “The Black New Yorker Who Led the Charge Against Police Violence in the 1830s” by Jonathan Daniel Wells.

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Mary Ann Shadd

Mary Ann Shadd Cary was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1823 where her parents were abolitionists and their home was a station on the Underground Railroad.

They moved to Pennsylvania so that their children could attend school because the education of Black children was illegal in Delaware. Cary studied at a Quaker school and became an educator, teaching for 12 years. After the passage of Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which was a threat to the safety of all African Americans, the Shadds moved to Canada.

Cary wrote and published a pamphlet encouraging other Blacks to settle in Canada and founded Canada’s first anti-slavery newspaper, the Provincial Freeman. She supported John Brown’s raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry and helped Osborne P. Anderson publish his firsthand account of the raid.

She returned to the U.S. where she became active in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and she studied law at Howard University. After initially being denied access to the bar, she received her law degree in 1883.

For more information on Shadd Cary’s life, read here.

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William Still

Fervent abolitionist. William Still was born free in 1821 and was known as the “Father of the Underground Railroad.” Still helped more than 800 people escape slavery and continue on the road to freedom. He also served as chairman of the Vigilance Committee for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. A meticulous record keeper, Still once discovered that he aided in the escape of an older brother who was left behind when their parents escaped slavery.

Still worked with a Underground Railroad network across New Jersey, New York, New England, and Canada, and even crossed paths with Harriet Tubman.

In 1872, Still published an account of his work on the Underground Railroad in The Underground Railroad Records. A leader in the community, Still also helped to establish an African American orphanage and open the first YMCA for Blacks in Philadelphia.

For more information on William Still’s life, read here.

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James McCune Smith

The African Free School opened on this day in 1788 in New York for the children of people who were enslaved and free Blacks. By the time it was incorporated into New York Public Schools in 1835, it had educated thousands of people including doctor and abolitionist James McCune Smith.

Learn more about the school’s history and see samples of student work in a New York Historical Society online archive.

Related resource: New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth by Alan Singer

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Harriet Tubman

Perhaps one of the most famous abolitionists and Underground Railroad operators, Harriet Tubman, was born into slavery in the early 1820s in Dorchester County, Maryland.

In 1849 Tubman fled Maryland for the north. She would return south on countless trips to bring people to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

Less known is her role during the Civil War when she led the Union army in the Raid at Combahee Ferry that freed more than 700 people from slavery. This was the only Civil War military operation led by a woman and it was extremely successful. Read more here.

Later in her life she also became active in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Read more at BlackPast.org.

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David Walker

In September 1829, David Walker published his “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.” The “Appeal” was a call to action against the terrorism and brutality of slavery and racism.

At the time, the “Appeal” was the most widely read anti-slavery document in the United States. Walker, with the help of sailors, church leaders, and more was able to smuggle copies of his “Appeal” to plantations in the South. As a result, Walker’s “Appeal” was banned in the South and laws were passed which made it illegal for Blacks to learn how to read.

A bounty was put on Walker’s head. In addition to penning the “Appeal,” Walker was a leading abolitionist and noted public speaker in Boston. He wrote and helped support the first African American newspaper, “Freedom’s Journal.” Three editions of Walker’s “Appeal” were published before he passed away in 1830.

Learn more at The David Walker Memorial Project.

When teaching Walker’s Appeal, it would be important to note that Native Americans were also frequently described with non-human terms such as “beasts” or as “savages.” And the tactic of renaming a group in order to dehumanize and oppress them can be seen in other settings, such as “gooks” in Vietnam. But the wholesale renaming of a people, to the point that even today many refer to “slaves” instead of “people” continues today with reference to enslaved Africans. For example, “slaves brought from Africa” or “George Washington had slaves” when in fact “people were brought in bondage from Africa” and “George Washington ‘owned and sold’ people.”

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Frank Emi

Wong Kim Ark

On March 28, 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, holding that children born in the United States, even to parents not eligible to become citizens, were nonetheless citizens themselves under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants who were barred from ever becoming U.S. citizens under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong Kim Ark was denied re-entry to the United States after a trip to China, on the grounds that the son of a Chinese national could never be a U.S. citizen. Wong sued the federal government, resulting in the Supreme Court’s seminal decision that the government could not deny citizenship to anyone born in the United States. [Adapted from Asian Americans Advancing Justice and PBS’s “Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.”]

Sworn statement of witnesses verifying departure statement of Wong Kim Ark, 11/02/1894. Source: Wikicommons

Read the 1882 Exclusion Act at OurDocuments.gov.

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Grace Lee Boggs

A prominent activist her entire adult life, Grace Lee Boggs (June 27, 1915 – October 5, 2015) was born in Rhode Island, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She studied at Barnard College and Bryn Mawr, receiving her Ph.D. in 1940. Her studies in philosophy and the writings of Marx, Hegel, and Margaret Mead led not to a life in academia, but rather to a lifetime of social activism.

Lee’s activism began in Chicago, where she joined the movement for tenants’ rights, and then the Workers Party, a splinter group of the Socialist Workers Party. In these associations, as well as in her involvement with the 1941 March on Washington, Lee focused on marginalized groups such as women and people of color. In 1953, Lee married Black auto worker and activist James (Jimmy) Boggs and moved to Detroit, where the two continued their activism. Jimmy died in 1993.

Boggs has rejected the stereotypical radical idea that capitalist society is just something to be done away with, believing more that “you cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.”

She believed that it is by working together in small groups that positive social change can happen, not in large revolutions where one group of power simply changes position with another. With this philosophy, she and her husband founded Detroit Summer in 1992. In a YES! Magazine interview, Boggs explains, “We wanted to engage young people in community-building activities: planting community gardens, recycling waste, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, rehabbing houses, painting public murals. Encouraging them to exercise their Soul Power would get their cognitive juices flowing. Learning would come from practice, which has always been the best way to learn.”

Boggs continued to write books and be an activist. She died in 2015 at the age of 100. [From Americans Who Tell the Truth.]

Learn more in the documentary “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs” and from her books, Living for Change: An Autobiography and The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century.

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May Chen

In 1982, May Chen led the New York Chinatown strike of 1982, one of the largest Asian American worker strikes with about 20,000 garment factory workers marching the streets of Lower Manhattan demanding work contracts.

Chen, then affiliated with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, was one of the strike organizers.

“The Chinatown community then had more and more small garment factories,” she recalled. “And the Chinese employers thought they could play on ethnic loyalties to get the workers to turn away from the union. They were very, very badly mistaken.”

Most of the protests included demands for higher wages, improved working conditions, and for management to observe the Confucian principles of fairness and respect. By many accounts, the workers won. The strike caused the employers to hold back on wage cuts and withdraw their demand that workers give up their holidays and some benefits. It paved the way for better working conditions such as hiring bilingual staff to interpret for workers and management, initiation of English-language classes, and van services for workers.

Read more about Asian immigrants in the workforce at the Feet in Two Worlds website.

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Ibrahim Chowdry

“I talk for those of our men who, in factory and field, in all sections of American industry, work side by side with their fellow American workers to strengthen the industrial framework of this country.”

— Ibrahim Chowdry, in a letter given for testimony during the U.S. Congressional Committee on Immigration and Naturalization hearings in 1945

Ibrahim Chowdry was a community organizer in New York, who worked across racial and religious lines to build coalitions between Bangladeshi immigrants and Puerto Rican and Black communities. Chowdry escaped a British crack down over his political activities in East Bengal and settled in New York City in the 1920s, where he and his fellow East Bengalis initiated numerous community organizations which included pooling their money to help open restaurants and small businesses, starting organizations to empower their communities, and offering social support for new immigrants who moved in.

In the book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, Chowdry’s son and daughter, Noor and Laila, recall his impact as a community leader by helping “ex-seamen with immigration problems,” “went from one New York-area hospital to the next, meeting with staff and asking them to call him whenever anyone was admitted with the surnames Meah, Ullah, Uddin, or Ali,” and “Bengali countrymen would call him on the phone and he would run off. If someone was sick or if someone died, he would make their funeral arrangements.” [From “Lost and Found: The Legacy of the Bangladeshi Sons of New York” by Nadia Hussain at Hyphen.com.]

Read more about the history of South Asian Americans in Vivek Bald’s book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America.

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Silme Domingo & Gene Viernes

In 1981 the labor leaders Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes were gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Domingo and Viernes were Filipino American activists and fishing cannery Local 37 union members who were involved in union reform and fighting for workers’ rights.

In an effort to address the discrimination and segregation towards Filipinos that had been going on for decades in the Alaskan seafood industry, organizers needed proof. Domingo and a partner posed as students from the University of Washington’s School of Fisheries and requested to document the canneries for a project. Instead, they gathered evidence of discrimination.

On Nov. 28, 1973, the Alaska Cannery Workers’ Association (ACWA, which Domingo and Viernes helped found) filed a class action lawsuit against several Alaskan fish companies, including one of the largest, the New England Fish Co. (NEFCO). It was the first time such an enormous seasonal migratory labor force was represented in a significant way with more than 700 plaintiffs in all. ACWA won a multi-million dollar settlement, and as a result NEFCO filed for bankruptcy.

Initially, the murders appeared to be retributions for reform efforts within Local 37 that threatened entrenched interests. But after a wide-ranging legal investigation launched by family, friends, and community groups, in 1989 a federal jury found that former Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos conspired to silence political opponents in the U.S. that resulted in the murders of Domingo and Viernes. The conspiracy involved the Marcos government, the president of Local 37, and a network of Marcos’ intelligence agents that operated within the United States since 1973, monitoring and harassing Marcos’ opponents in the United States. [From “The ‘Cannery Murders’ of 1981 still haunt local labor activists” and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.]

Learn more in the book Remembering Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes: The Legacy of Filipino American Labor Activism by Ron Chew and the documentary One Generation’s Time: The Legacy of Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes.

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Frank S. Emi and Draft Resisters

Frank Emi, a grocer from Los Angeles and Japanese-American, was an activist during World War II. He was a leading figure of the Fair Play Committee, an ad hoc group that protested the drafting of Japanese Americans during World War II, and served an 18 months sentence for refusing the draft.

From the Densho Encyclopedia:

Convicted of conspiracy to violate the Selective Service Act, Emi served 18 months in a federal penitentiary.

Emi later explained: “I could not believe that the government could actually put us in camp, strip us of everything . . . and then order us into the military as if nothing had happened.”

He added, “We could either tuck our tails between our legs like dogs or stand up like free men and fight for justice. Some of us chose the latter. We were going to resist.”

Learn more about Frank Emi’s interrogation while incarcerated in Wyoming.

Executive Order 9066

On Feb. 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066 was issued by President Franklin Roosevelt. It authorized the incarceration (internment) of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. About 122,000 people were sent to concentration camps. Many of their homes, businesses, and farms were confiscated.

We refer to the internment as incarceration. This choice of language is recommended by the Densho Encyclopedia, because “One of the strategies employed by the federal government to sell the forced removal and confinement of Japanese American from the West Coast during World War II was the use of euphemistic terms that masked the true nature of what was being done.” Read their full statement, Do words matter?

Learn more about the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in our This Day in History entry for Feb. 19.

Gidra

During its 1969 to 1974 run, Gidra chronicled the dramatic changes in the Asian American community, and was itself a catalyst for many of these changes.

The roots of Gidra stem from a group of students at UCLA who approached the administration about starting an Asian American community newspaper in 1969. Rebuffed, the five each kicked in $100 to produce their own paper. Tracy Okida came up with the name, which came from a giant three-headed dragon from Japanese monster movies of the 1960s. Initially based at the newly formed Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, Gidra helped define the terms of the Asian American Movement for many and covered the fight for ethnic studies on college campuses, along with rising activism in Asian American communities. Though pan Asian American in its orientation, it was largely a Sansei enterprise with three-quarters or more of the staff being Japanese American. As the publication evolved and moved off campus to an office in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles, its scope broadened to encompass an Asian American perspective on the international anti-imperialist movement, linking the war in Vietnam to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to other movements in Asia including Okinawa, the Philippines, and Korea. [From the Densho website.]

Continue reading about the history of Gidra newspaper by Brian Niiya, Densho Content Director.

View the online archives at the Densho Digital Repository.

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The International Hotel Struggle

On August 4, 1977, after battling eviction for over nine years, the community of mostly Filipino and Chinese low-income senior tenants of the International Hotel (I-Hotel) was brought to a violent end in the early morning hours. At around 4 a.m., over 300 riot-equipped police and sheriff’s deputies, cordoned off the surrounding streets, encircled the hotel, and began to forcefully evict the residents. De Guzman, then the president of the International Hotel Tenants Association, described what happened:

Once the police and sheriffs got into the building, they broke into the tenants’ rooms. Then they started breaking things up, stealing, taking what the manongs [Filipino males] had, broke the toilets that way there were no toilet facilities, so the tenants could never return.

August, 1977: San Francisco Sheriffs’ deputies and police confront demonstrators trying to prevent forced eviction of the hotel’s elderly tenants. Source: Nancy Wong/ WikiCommons

Outside, more than 2,000 community activists and protesters created a human barricade trying to prevent the eviction. Shouting “We won’t move!” I-Hotel defenders—that included not only Filipinos but other Asian Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, student activists, religious groups and organizations, gays and lesbians, leftists, and community activists — lined up nine rows deep as the police started their frontal assault. The police were brutalizing people outside in front of the hotel, said De Guzman. They would run their horses up front and hit people with their clubs. They just tore people up, hitting them on the head, and jabbing them with nightsticks.

The building was eventually sold with plans to build a parking garage. However, the lot remained empty, and in 2005 a new International Hotel — now on the register of historic buildings — was built containing 105 low-income apartments for senior housing, thanks to the ongoing activism and advocating for fair housing. [Adapted from James Sobredo’s “The Battle for the International Hotel” and “I-Hotel Eviction Summary” posted on FoundSF.org.]

Read more at ShelterForce and Manilatown Heritage Foundation’s “International Hotel’s Final Victory [PDF]”.

Browse lessons on housing and displacement.

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Larry Itliong

Born in San Nicolas, Pangasinan in 1913, Larry Itliong immigrated to the United States in 1929 and worked as a laborer and farmhand in several states including Washington, Alaska, Montana, South Dakota, and California. During his time in Alaska, he earned the nickname “Seven Fingers” after losing three of his fingers in an accident at the cannery where he worked. Seeing the plight of his fellow Filipinos and immigrants who were mistreated and paid poorly, Itliong joined strikes and helped set up labor unions including one in Alaska.

On September 8, 1965, Larry Itliong, a member of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, called a strike against the Delano, California, grape growers in order to demand salaries equivalent to the federal minimum wage and the right to form their own union. Led by Itliong, more than one thousand Filipino workers walked out of their grape farms to picket, however, farmers replaced them with Mexican workers. As fellow striker Andy Imutan recalls, “There was no unity between the Mexicans and the Filipinos. The growers were very successful in dividing us and creating conflict between the two races. Larry Itliong and I decided to take action by seeing Cesar Chavez, the leader of the National Farm Workers Association. We met to come up with a plan that would be beneficial for everyone, including the Mexican workers.”

A week after the strike, they were joined by the Mexican-dominated National Farm Workers led by Cesar Chavez. The two groups merged together to create the United Farm Workers Union, with Cesar Chavez as director and Larry Itliong as assistant director. This strike would be known as the Delano Grape Strike of 1965 and would last five years.

Watch a remembrance clip from Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

Since 2015, October 25 in California is known as Larry Itliong Day.

Learn more about Larry Itliong in the documentary “The Delano Manongs” and in the NPR news report, “Grapes of Wrath: The Forgotten Filipinos Who Led a Farmworker Revolution.”

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 Fred Korematsu

Fred Korematsu (Jan. 30, 1919–Mar. 30, 2005), a U.S. citizen and the son of Japanese immigrants, had refused to evacuate when President Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Korematsu, age 23, was arrested, convicted, and sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah. Persuaded by Ernest Besig, then executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, Korematsu filed a case on June 12, 1942. The premise of the lawsuit was that Korematsu’s constitutional rights had been violated and he had suffered racial discrimination. However, the court ruled against Korematsu and he was sentenced to five years probation. Determined to pursue his cause, Korematsu filed an appeal with Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, later, to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled against him, and confirmed that the denial of civil liberties based on race and national origin was legal.

In 1983, Prof. Peter Irons, a legal historian, together with researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, discovered key documents that government intelligence agencies had hidden from the Supreme Court in 1944. The documents consistently showed that Japanese Americans had committed no acts of treason to justify mass incarceration. With this new evidence, a pro-bono legal team that included the Asian Law Caucus re-opened Korematsu’s 40-year-old case on the basis of government misconduct. On November 10, 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned in a federal court in San Francisco. It was a pivotal moment in civil rights history. [From the Fred T. Korematsu Institute website and Of Civil Wrongs and Rights website.]

On Jan. 30, 2011, the state of California celebrated Fred Korematsu Day, the first day named after an Asian American in the United States, now recognized by six states.

Learn more about the case and additional resources on the Japanese internment.

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Yuri Kochiyama

Yuri Kochiyama (May 19, 1921 – June 1, 2014) was a tireless political activist who dedicated her life to contributing to social change through her participation in social justice and human rights movements.

She was born and raised in San Pedro, California. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, her father, just out of surgery, was arrested and detained in a hospital. “He was the only Japanese in that hospital,” Kochiyama recalls, “so they hung a sheet around him that said, ‘Prisoner of War.'” He died shortly thereafter. In 1943, under President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Kochiyama and her family were sent to a concentration camp in Jerome, Arkansas, for two years. This experience and her father’s death made Kochiyama highly aware of governmental abuses and would forever bond her to those engaged in political struggles. After being released, she moved to New York and married Bill Kochiyama, veteran of the all-Japanese American 442nd combat unit of the U.S. Army.

Kochiyama’s activism started in Harlem in the early 1960s, where she participated in the Asian American, Black, and Third World movements for civil and human rights, ethnic studies, and against the war in Vietnam. She was a fixture in support movements involving organizations such as the Young Lords and the Harlem Community for Self Defense. As founder of Asian Americans for Action, she also sought to build a more political Asian American movement that would link itself to the struggle for Black liberation. “Racism has placed all ethnic peoples in similar positions of oppression poverty and marginalization.” In 1963, she met Malcolm X. Their friendship and political alliance changed her life and outlook. She joined his group, the Organization for Afro-American Unity, to work for racial justice and human rights. Yuri was present on the day he was tragically shot and killed in 1965. In the Life magazine article “Death of Malcolm X,” she can be seen crouched in the background, cradling Malcolm X’s head.

In the 1980s, Kochiyama worked in the redress and reparations movement for Japanese-Americans along with her husband Bill. Support for political prisoners — African American, Puerto Rican, Native American, Asian American, and progressive whites — has been a consistent thread in her work. [From Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Women of Hope: Asian Americans.]

Learn more about Kochiyama in:

• a tribute, Yuri Kochiyama: Passing It On, on the Zinn Education Project
• a dramatic reading of Yuri Kochiyama’s “Then Came the War” (1991) by Deepa Fernandes
• her memoir Passing It On
• the biography Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
• and the film Passion for Justice
• the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project website.

Watch this remembrance clip from Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

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Kiyoshi Kuromiya

Born in the Heart Mountain, Wyoming, internment camp in 1943, Kiyoshi Kuromiya (May 9, 1943 – May 10, 2000) was a lifelong activist participating in several movements including civil rights, protesting the Vietnam War, LGBT rights, and AIDS/HIV advocacy.

In 1968, as an architecture student at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, he and some friends held a demonstration against the use of napalm in Vietnam by announcing that a dog would be burned alive with napalm in front of the university library. Thousands turned up to protest, only to be handed a leaflet reading: “Congratulations on your anti-napalm protest. You saved the life of a dog. Now, how about saving the lives of tens of thousands of people in Vietnam.”

Kuromiya spent the spring and summer of 1965 in the South fighting for civil rights, and became friends with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When King was assassinated, Kuromiya helped take care of the King children.

Kuromiya participated with the Gay Pioneers in the first organized gay and lesbian civil rights demonstrations, “the Annual Reminders,” held at Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell each Fourth of July from 1965 to 1969. He was one of the founders of Gay Liberation Front-Philadelphia and served as an openly gay delegate to the Black Panther Convention that endorsed the gay liberation struggle. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1989, Kuromiya became a self-taught expert on the disease, operating under the mantra “information is power.” He founded the Critical Path Project, which provided resources to people living with HIV and AIDS, including a newsletter, a library and a 24-hour phone line. [Adapted from LGBT History Month, NBC News, and ACT UP-New York.]

Learn more about Kuromiya in this remembrance video by friend Alfredo Sosa.

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Corky Lee

For nearly fifty years, Corky Lee documented the lives of Asian Pacific Americans at work, at leisure, and as activists. Born in Queens, New York, to Chinese immigrants, Lee grew up seeing very few people who looked like him or shared his family’s culture and he grew into awareness of how this harmed Asian Americans living in the United States. His photography became a corrective to narratives that erased Asian Americans and a journalistic record of political activism.

Lee died in early 2021 from complications due to COVID-19. In an obituary, Vulture writers Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky describe his activism and rise to prominence in the 1970s:

One of the earliest pictures he sold was an image of a bloodied Chinese American man named Peter Yew, who was beaten by police after trying to intervene in their assault on a Chinese teenager. It ended up on the front page of the New York Post in 1975, and 2,500 Chinatown residents marched on City Hall in protest of police brutality. Lee would show up at protests against the Vietnam War or the construction of a jail, or join picket lines with Chinatown workers protesting their exploitative employers. Rallying fellow artists and activists he met, he helped found influential community groups and collectives, including Basement Workshop.

Peter Yew police brutality protests in front of New York City Supreme Court. Source: Corky Lee/Interference Archives

Learn more about Corky Lee’s photography in an exhibition review from 2013 and in the New York Times‘ series “Those We’ve Lost.”

Martha and Berda Lum

Patsy Mink

Congresswoman Patsy Mink (December 6, 1927 – September 28, 2002) was the first Asian American woman elected to Congress, and ran 18 political campaigns since 1956. Through it all, Mink has consistently taken moral stands on behalf of Asian Americans, women, and children—even at potential risk to her political career.

She attended the University of Nebraska and discovered that the “International House” dormitory where she was placed was designated solely for students of color because they were not allowed to live in the regular dorms. She protested and rallied the support of students, parents, and university trustees. Within months, the policy of segregated housing was abolished.

Mink originally plan­ned to attend medical school, but her 25 applications were rejected because medical schools were all male. Instead, she went to the University of Chicago law school, married John Francis Mink, and had a daughter, Wendy. The family returned to Hawaii after Mink’s graduation, when in 1953, she became the first Japanese American woman admitted to the practice law in Hawaii. However, she could not find work as women were expected to be full-time mothers. Determined to practice law, Mink set up her own law office.

In 1956, she ran for the House of Representatives, won, and established herself as an independent voice. On her very first day, she offered a resolution protesting British nuclear testing in the South Pacific; the resolution passed.

Mink was selected to speak at the 1960 Democratic National Convention. In her speech to the con­vention, she stated, “If to believe in freedom and equality is to be a radi­cal, then I am a radical.”

During her 12-year congressional tenure, she consistently voted for a progressive agenda. She introduced the first comprehensive Early Childhood Education Act (later vetoed by President Richard Nixon), authored the Women’s Educational Equity Act, criticized the Vietnam War, and spoke out against the secret bombing of Southeast Asia. In 1972, Mink played a key role in the enactment of Title IX of the Higher Education Act Amendments, which prohibited gen­der discrimination by federally-funded institutions. This legisla­tion has been an important factor in ensuring equity for women in all educational programs, particularly school sports.

Mink was concerned about a woman’s movement that focuses too much on middle-class white women. “The ‘glass ceiling’ is an upper-class glass ceiling for those aspiring to be bank presidents and executives, not those who can never rise above the minimum wage. The majority of people working at minimum-wage jobs in the United States are women. That’s the glass ceiling I am committed to doing something about.” [From Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Women of Hope: Asian Americans.]

Learn more about Mink in the documentary Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority. Trailer:

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Peter Yew/Police Brutality Protests, 1975

In April 1975, Peter Yew, a young Chinese-American living in New York City’s Chinatown, asked police to stop beating a 15-year-old whom they had stopped for a traffic violation. For his concern, Yew was savagely beaten right on the spot, taken back to the police station, stripped, beaten again and arrested on charges of resisting arrest and assault on a police officer.

His beating was the last straw as 15,000 Chinatown community members took to the streets to fight back against police attacks and brutality against their community. Virtually every shop and factory in Chinatown was closed on May 19th for the demonstration and signs reading “Closed to Protest Police Brutality” were put in windows and on doors. The community united around demands for the dismissal of all charges against Yew, an end to discrimination of the Chinese community, and an end to discrimination in employment, housing, education, health, and all other social services for all minorities and working people.

A week before the May 19th demo, several thousand people had marched on City Hall under an action sponsored by the Asian Americans for Equal Employment (AAFEE), raising demands similar to those raised at the May 19th action. The local business community and establishment refused to publicize or endorse the AAFEE action. A week later, the Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) called the May 19th action, bringing out old and young in one of the most united and militant actions ever taken by Chinatown residents. Although the CCBA tried to keep demands focused just on Peter Yew, the people of Chinatown clearly saw the broader issues, the fact that police repression was coming down in communities all across the U.S. This was shown by the slogans raised such as “Fight Police Brutality, Fight all Oppression!”

When the cops attacked the march, the people responded immediately and fought back. As the police tried to drag off one of the demonstrators, others in the march jumped the cops and fought them tooth and nail. When two of the people were arrested and taken to the police station, the crowd surrounded the station and secured the release of their friends. [From Vietnam Veterans Against the War.]

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Ai-Jen Poo

When Poo started organizing domestic workers in 2000, many thought she was taking on an impossible task. Domestic workers were too dispersed, spread out over too many homes. Even Poo had described the world of domestic work as the “Wild West.” Poo’s first big breakthrough with the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) happened on July 1, 2010, when the New York state legislature passed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The bill legitimated domestic workers and gave them the same lawful rights as any other employee, such as vacation time and overtime pay. Though the bill was considered a major victory, the NDWA did not stop there, expanding operations to include 17 cities and 11 states.

Read more about the NDWA here: www.domesticworkers.org.

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Jung Sai Garment Workers Strike, 1974

On July 15, 1974, workers at the Jung Sai factory (manufacturers of popular teen clothing brand Esprit de Corps) in San Francisco went on strike after Frankie Ma, a union activist, was fired for “unsatisfactory work.” Workers at Jung Sai endured appalling conditions: they earned $2 per hour and their work days often stretched to ten hours with few breaks, and no overtime pay. They had just voted in the union and saw this firing as an act of retaliation. The workers — most of them middle-aged Chinese immigrant women—protested the firing and unfair labor practices, and demanded better working conditions and the right to organize. This united body of immigrant workers inspired popular support from community, student, and working-class populations throughout the San Francisco Bay area.

Their interaction with hundreds of Asian-American activists and supporters became an important turning point for Asian-American activism in the San Francisco Bay Area. The strike lasted six months and encouraged further immigrant activism, energizing a grassroots movement among Chinese immigrant workers facing similar unfair labor practices. After the plant closed down, claiming bankruptcy, the workers brought a suit before the National Relations Labor Board and won nearly 10 years later.

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Rinku Sen

“I learned a lot about how human beings change, about the sense of worth that has to be activated in order for people to demand more out of society, and the sense of connection that has to be activated for people to stand up together and for each other.”

Rinku Sen is the president and executive director of Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation, and the publisher of the award-winning news site Colorlines. As a racial justice activist and community organizer, Sen’s leadership at Race Forward has generated some of the most impactful racial justice successes, including the Drop the I-Word campaign aimed at media outlets to stop referring to immigrants as “illegal.” This resulted in the Associated Press, USA Today, L.A. Times, and many more dropping the i-word, affecting millions of readers every day.

Born in India, her family moved to upstate New York when she was five. Some of Sen’s earliest recollections of life in India were tinged by race, Sen told NBC News. “One of my earliest memories was of being in the bath scrubbing myself when I was four-ish, trying to get as light as my cousin, whose mother is Dutch,” she said.

Sen started her organizing career as a student activist at Brown University, fighting race, gender, and class discrimination on campuses. Majoring in Women’s Studies and receiving a Master’s degree in Journalism, Sen has written extensively about the race and gender dimensions of community organizing and is the author of Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization. [Adapted from Race Forward, NBC News, and Stir It Up.]

Learn more about Sen and the work of Race Forward at raceforward.org.

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Ronald Takaki

Ronald Toshiyuki Takaki (April 12, 1939 – May 26, 2009) was the author and editor of more than 20 books, including  Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993).

Takaki established UC Berkeley‘s PhD program in ethnic studies, the first of its kind in the nation. “Ron Takaki elevated and popularized the study of America’s multiracial past and present like no other scholar, and in doing so had an indelible impact on a generation of students and researchers across the nation and world,” according to Don T. Nakanishi, director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.

Born in Honolulu on April 12, 1939, he was the grandson of a Japanese immigrant who went to Hawaii in 1886 to work in the sugar cane fields. After his father died, Takaki, who was seven, was raised by his mother and Chinese stepfather. He attended the College of Wooster in Ohio, where he was one of two Asian Americans on campus. This experience gave him a new awareness of himself as an ethnic American. Takaki recalled in a 2000 Lincoln Journal Star interview that one of his professors “asked me how long I’d been in this country, where did I learn to speak English. I told him I was from Hawaii and he says, ‘But how long have you been in this country?’ I guess I didn’t look American.”

Takaki went on to earn a master’s degree in 1962, and a Ph.D. in history in 1967 from UC Berkeley, where he became drawn to campus activism, including the Free Speech Movement. “I was born intellectually and politically in Berkeley in the ’60s,” he told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter in 2003.

In 1966, he was hired to teach UCLA’s first Black history course in the wake of the explosive Watts riots. When a student in the Black history class asked him which revolutionary tools he could teach them, Takaki replied: “We’re going to study the history of the U.S. as it relates to African Americans. We’re going to strengthen our critical thinking skills and our writing skills. These can be revolutionary tools if we make them so.”

In 1971, Takaki returned to UC Berkeley as the Department of Ethnic Studies’ first full-time teacher. He became wildly popular, filling auditoriums with hundreds of students hungry for perspectives on the struggles of America’s minority groups. Takaki served as chair of ethnic studies from 1975-77, and in the mid-1980s established at UC Berkeley the nation’s first doctorate program in ethnic studies. He then turned his attention to ensuring that each student satisfy an American Cultures requirement to graduate. He was a vigorous proponent of multicultural education and a vocal opponent of Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative that rolled back affirmative action policies in state-funded institutions. [From Los Angeles Times and UC Berkeley News.]

Learn more about Ronald Takaki.

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Philip Vera Cruz

‘The movement should be the most important thing. … The movement must go beyond its leaders.”

Philip Vera Cruz (December 25, 1904 – June 12, 1994), a Filipino immigrant, worked in the midwest then moved to California in 1943 becoming a farm worker. He joined the Agricultural Worker Organizing Committee (AWOC) and soon became a leader in farm worker’s rights. In 1965, he was an active force in the AWOC decision to strike against grape growers in Delano, California. The strike and boycott soon won the support of Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers of America, and led to the eventual merging of the two groups to form the United Farm Workers. Vera Cruz was elected a vice president of the union, a position he held until he left the union in protest in 1977. Cruz also formed the Farm Workers Credit Union and created Agbayani Village, a retirement community for older farm workers.

Throughout his career Vera Cruz worked for migrant and farm worker rights, and was active in the Asian American, especially Filipino, rights movement and community.

Vera Cruz once wrote, “Leadership, I feel, is only incidental to the movement. The movement should be the most important thing. If the leader becomes the most important part of the movement, then you don’t have a movement after the leader is gone. The movement must go beyond its leaders. It must be something that is continuous, with goals and ideals that the leadership can build on.” [Adapted from the Walter P. Ruether Library biography.]

Watch this remembrance clip from Asian Americans Advancing Justice:

AAPI Civil Rights Heroes – Philip Vera Cruz from Advancing Justice – ALC on Vimeo.

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Ngo Vinh Long

Ngo Vinh Long (April 10, 1944 – October 12, 2022) was a Vietnamese American historian, lifelong activist, and author of the 1973 book Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French.

Born in the Mekong Delta, he fought U.S. involvement in Vietnam at an early age. He emigrated from Vietnam in 1964 to attend Harvard University, where he studied under Henry Kissinger and Samuel Huntington. Vinh Long helped create the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (now Critical Asian Studies) in the late 1960s, and was a professor of history at the University of Maine from 1985 to 2022.

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Yick Wo v. Hopkins

On May 10, 1886, Lee Yick won a Supreme Court case that ensured that all people —citizens and non-citizens — had equal protection under the law.

Lee Yick and Wo Lee, Chinese immigrants, ran laundries in San Francisco. In 1880, San Francisco passed a law requiring a permit for laundries housed in wooden buildings as they were more vulnerable to fires. Of the 320 laundries in San Francisco, 310 were in wooden buildings, and most of them — 240 — were owned by Chinese persons. Not one Chinese laundry applicant was issued a permit. When Sheriff Hopkins tried to arrest Yick and Lee for not having a permit, they refused to pay the $10 fine, and were jailed. Each sued, arguing that the fine and discriminatory enforcement of the ordinance violated their rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Their cases, compiled under the name Yick Wo v. Hopkins, was argued at the Supreme Court in 1886 (Yick Wo was the name of the laundry that Lee Yick ran).

In an unanimous opinion authored by Justice T. Stanley Matthews, the court concluded that, despite the impartial wording of the law, its biased enforcement violated the Equal Protection Clause. According to the court, even if the law is impartial on its face, “if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand.” The kind of biased enforcement experienced by the plaintiffs, the court concluded, amounted to “a practical denial by the state of that equal protection of the law” and therefore violated the provision of the 14th Amendment. [Adapted from PBS’s “The Strange Case of the Chinese Laundry,” and Oyez.org.]

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Merle Woo

In 1982, Merle Woo challenged UC Berkeley after being fired from her job as a lecturer in Asian American Studies/Ethnic Studies (AAS). Woo, a member of the Freedom Socialist Party, Radical Women, an open lesbian, and a renowned poet, was fired after criticizing the increasing conservatism of tenure-track faculty in UC’s Asian American Studies Department. Her 1982 federal and state lawsuits charged the university with discrimination based on race, sex, political ideology, and sexual orientation. As Woo explained in a news release, “They fired me because I was visible. I took my protected free speech rights seriously, spoke out against the imminent death of Ethnic Studies, spoke out about who I am, totally and fully and with dignity.” Woo’s supporters included Angela Davis, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Barbara Smith, Congressman Ron Dellums, Gloria Steinem, and Mitsuye Yamada.

Woo won the free speech/multi-discrimination case against UC Berkeley and was reinstated in 1984, only to be fired again in 1986. In 1989, she won a union arbitration against UC Berkeley. [Adapted from Proud Heritage: People, Issues, and Documents of the LGBT Experience, Freedom Socialist: Voice of Revolutionary Feminism, and The Merle Woo Project Prize.]

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Angela Bambace

In 1955, Angela Bambace (1889-1975) became the first Italian immigrant woman to hold a leadership position in the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) as vice president.

Bambace’s family had moved from Italy to the United States, settling in East Harlem, where Bambace’s mother worked in the garment industry. After completing high school in 1917, Angela and her sister Maria joined their mother at a shirtwaist factory operating sewing machines. There the young women were exposed to the exploitative and dangerous working conditions for women workers of the garment industry.

When the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Association (ACWA) began the fight to unionize the shop, Angela and Maria participated in walk-outs, strikes, and other forms of protest, marking the beginning of their long lives as labor activists.

Bambace’s organizing expanded into the network of New York City garment worker organizers and she quickly became known as a fierce champion of labor rights. She would go on to unionizing garment workers in Baltimore, serve as the district manager for the states of Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia, and become vice president of the ILGWU. Bambace died of cancer at the age of 86 in 1975. [By Kathryn Anastasi.]

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Maria and Pietro Botto

A young immigrant couple from northern Italy, in 1892 Pietro and Maria Botto moved to New Jersey where Pietro found work in the silk mills. During the nearby Paterson Silk Strike of 1913, the Botto’s invited strike leaders and organizers with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to hold meetings and rallies at their home. The Botto House, as it was known, became a central hub for those on strike, and organizers who spoke from the house included Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Upton Sinclair, Carlo Tresca, Adolph Lessig, and many others. Today, the Botto House is an official National Historic Landmark and home of the American Labor Museum.

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RoseAnn DeMoro

RoseAnne DeMoro was the Executive Director of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union and professional association for registered nurses. Born in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, DeMoro grew up working class. In 1977, she and her husband moved to California where DeMoro pursued a doctorate in sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. It was during this time that she decided to shift careers and joined the Teamsters as a labor organizer. In 1986, she joined the California Nurses Association and helped the organization grow into one of the most powerful unions in the country, eventually combining in 2009 with other major nurse associations to form National Nurses United.

As one of the fastest-growing organizations in the U.S., National Nurses United represents 170,000 registered nurses. Under DeMoro’s leadership, the group became known for running well-publicized and creative campaigns and taking on some of the toughest opponents in politics and government. To date, the organization has led influential campaigns for limits on managed care abuses, landmark reforms for patients, such as campaigning for the expansion of Medicare to cover more patients, record improvements for registered nurses, and reforms on nurse-to-patient care.

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Ralph Fasanella

Ralph Fasanella (1914-1997) worked in machine shops and dress shops, drove trucks, pumped gas, and organized workers for higher wages and a better life. He was also a self-taught artist. Many of his paintings reflect a nation of working people who took collective action to improve life on and off the job. Fasanella encouraged people to remember our history and heritages, “Lest we forget.” [From the Ralph Fasanella website.]

Fasanella fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.

While he began painting in the 1940s, his work did not reach national acclaim until after the McCarthy era, in the 1970s. One of his most recognized paintings is of the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike.

The Great Strike: Lawrence 1912. © Estate of Ralph Fasanella. Click to enlarge.

Learn more about Fasanella at www.fasanella.org.

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Arturo M. Giovannitti

Arturo Giovannitti (1884-1959), was a poet and labor organizer. In 1912, he traveled to Lawrence, Massachusetts to help his friend and fellow I.W.W. organizer Joseph Ettor lead the Textile Mill Strike, known as the Bread and Roses Strike. Mill owners accused Giovannitti and Ettor with inciting violence. When textile worker Ana LoPizzo was killed during a clash with state militia, striker Joseph Caruso was charged for the murder, and Giovannitti and Ettor were charged as accessories to murder, although they were miles away from the scene. Their trial gained international attention. In a closing statement to the jury, Giovannitti spoke about his dedication to the ideals of the working class (Voices of a People’s History, pp. 274-277):

We shall return again to our humble efforts, obscure, humble, unknown, misunderstood — soldiers of this mighty army of the working class of the world, which out of the shadows and the darkness of the past is striving towards the destined goal, which is the emancipation of human kind, which is the establishment of love and brotherhood and justice for every man and every woman in this earth.

On Nov. 26, 1912, all three men were acquitted of the charges. [Sources: ItalyHeritage.com, Voices of a People’s History, and Bread and Roses Centennial Exhibit]

Learn more about Arturo Giovannitti at www.italyheritage.com.

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Father James Groppi

Father James Groppi was a Catholic priest who helped win the 1968 fight for open-housing in Milwaukee by leading 200 consecutive daily marches through the streets there. From 1965 to 1975, ”Groppi” was a common headline word nationally as he led demonstrations for civil rights, welfare rights, Native Americans, and against war. Since being excommunicated for his marriage in 1976, he had considered himself a ”Catholic in exile.”

He participated in the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. He was then assistant pastor of St. Boniface Catholic Church in a predominantly Black section of Milwaukee. Groppi had been arrested for the first time when he and other clergy formed a human chain in front of a Milwaukee school to protest de facto segregation.

This short description is from the Chicago Tribune. Read in full. Read more about Groppi in an online profile at the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee and in the book, Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City.

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Viola Liuzzo Family

Viola Liuzzo (1925 – 1965) was a civil rights activist who was brutally killed by the KKK. Luizzo was driving people home from the March to Selma in 1965, when a car pulled up alongside her vehicle and began shooting, killing Luizzo.

Luizzo was born Viola Gregg. She married a man of Italian descent, Anthony Luizzo, and raised a family. After her death, a smear campaign ensued that was mounted by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI [COINTELPRO], as a means of diverting attention from the fact that a key FBI informant was in the car with Liuzzo’s killers. The campaign, as well as violent behavior, took a toll on Luizzo’s family. A group of people had tried to break down the Liuzzos’ door, and a cross was burned on their lawn. Luizzo’s daughter Sally Liuzzo-Prado recalls one morning after her mother’s death, “These people — grown-ups — lined the street and were throwing rocks at me, calling me ‘N-lover’s baby.’ I didn’t know what that meant.”

On May 3, 1965, the trial of Liuzzo’s killers began. One of the men in the car, Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., was an FBI informant and thus was protected by the FBI. The three others were indicted on a state charge of murder and a federal charge of civil rights violation. In the federal trial the defendants were found guilty and were sentenced to ten years in prison, a landmark in southern legal history. [Adapted from NPR’s “Killed For Taking Part In ‘Everybody’s Fight’” and the Viola Liuzzo Collection.] Read more in our #tdih post.

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Vito Marcantonio

Elected to Congress from New York’s ethnically Italian and Puerto Rican East Harlem slums, Vito Marcantonio, in his time, held office longer than any other third-party radical, serving seven terms from 1934 to 1950. Colorful and controversial, Marcantonio captured national prominence as a powerful orator and brilliant parliamentarian. Often allied with the U.S. Communist Party (CP), he was an advocate of civil rights, civil liberties, labor unions, and Puerto Rican independence.

He supported social security and unemployment legislation for what later was called a “living wage” standard. And he annually introduced anti-lynching and anti–poll tax bills a decade before it became respectable.

He also opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), redbaiting, and antisemitism, and fought for the rights of the foreign-born. He was a bold outspoken opponent of U.S. imperialism. [Biography by John J. Simon from “Rebel in the House: The Life and Times of Vito Marcantonio” at MonthlyReview.org.]

Learn more at www.vitomarcantonio.org.

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Tony Mazzocchi

Anthony “Tony” Mazzocchi was a 20th-century labor activist who became a leader known for his radical politics, solidarity with the environmental movement, and dedication to union organizing. Born in Brooklyn in 1926, he grew up in the Great Depression and dropped out of high school to join the Army during World War II. When he returned from the war, he worked in several trades and was elected to be president of his local by age 26.

The United Steelworkers Tony Mazzocchi Center (USWTMC) for Health, Safety and Environmental Education describes the progress he helped working people achieve:

Some of his local’s achievements included the first dental plan in the country, early support for the civil rights movement, massive organizing efforts all over the New York area, and the rebuilding of the entire Democratic party of Long Island.

Mazzocchi was appointed Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers citizenship-legislative director in 1965 and moved to Washington, D. C. In this capacity, he discovered that workers across the country were facing clouds of toxic substances on the shop floor. He developed a national mobilization and educational campaign that led to the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.

He also was the first union activist to unite with environmentalists who helped to pass the Clean Air Act and other environmental bills. In addition to these legislative successes, Mazzocchi invented the concepts of “Right to Know” and “Right to Act” for the toxic substances faced at work and was the first unionist to conduct education on global warming.

He was also a friend and collaborator of union organizer Karen Silkwood, who famously blew the whistle on dangerous conditions related to the production of nuclear power at the Kerr McGee Company.

Learn more about his life in the book The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi by Les Leopold and in his obituary at the New York Times.

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Vito Russo

I was fighting for the generations that were going to come after me so that young gay people who were 14 or 15 wouldn’t have to grow up the way we did. — Vito Russo

Vito Russo (1946-1990) was a gay rights activist and a film historian. Russo is best known for his groundbreaking book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, an exploration of the ways in which gays and lesbians were portrayed in film, what lessons those characters taught gay and straight audiences, and how those negative images were at the root of society’s homophobia. In 1985, Russo help founded GLAAD, an organization that monitors LGBT representation in the media. [Sources: LGBT History Month website, Vito film, and Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo]

Read more about Russo at LBGThistorymonth.com and in the biopic, Vito. View a video of Wallace Shawn reading Russo’s “Why We Fight” on the Voices of a People’s History Vimeo page. See the film, How to Survive a Plague.

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Sacco and Vanzetti

On July 14, 1921, anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were found guilty of murder despite a lack of evidence and an international campaign for their release. The trial took place during the height of the Red Scare, and symbolized the prejudice views against immigrants, labor unions, and political radicals that was fueled by the Department of Justice raids — known as “the Palmer Raids” — in targeted communities.

Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927.

Read Woody Guthrie’s ballads about the trial.

Read an article by Howard Zinn about the relevance of this case today and read Instead of Columbus Day, Italian-Americans Should Celebrate Sacco and Vanzetti Day on August 23 in Teen Vogue.

View a video of Steve Earle reading Vanzetti’s speech to the court on the Voices of a People’s History Vimeo page.

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Mario Savio

In 1964, Mario Savio (1942-1996) came to public notice as a spokesperson for the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley, where he led a non-violent campaign to inspire thousands of fellow Berkeley students to protest university regulations, which severely limited political speech and activity on campus.

Savio had volunteered with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. He planned to raise money for SNCC on his return to university. That was when he learned of the ban on political activity and fundraising. He launched the first protest on October 1, 1964 when a fellow student was arrested for distributing literature from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

The non-violent campaign culminated in the largest mass arrest in U.S. history, drew widespread faculty support, and resulted in a revision of university rules to permit political speech and organizing. This significant advance for student freedom rapidly spread to countless other colleges and universities across the country. Read more.

Also read, “Remembering Mario Savio, ‘Freedom’s Orator‘” by Tom Hayden in The Nation.

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Eleanor Smeal

Once you recognize discrimination, you see it everywhere. Injustice doesn’t live forever. But it takes constant work, and it takes standing up, and you can’t worry about what people are thinking. — Eleanor Smeal

For more than 30 years, Eleanor Smeal has been on the frontlines fighting for women’s equality and is currently president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which she co-founded.

Recognized throughout the nation as a women’s rights leader, for more than two decades Eleanor Smeal has played a leading role in both national and state campaigns to win women’s rights legislation and in a number of landmark state and federal court cases for women’s rights.

One of the architects of the modern drive for women’s equality, Smeal is known as a political analyst, strategist, and grassroots organizer. She has played a pivotal role in defining the debate, developing the strategies, and charting the direction of the modern day women’s movement. Smeal was the first to identify the “gender gap”—the difference in the way women and men vote—and popularized the usage of the term “gender gap” in election and polling analyses to enhance women’s voting clout. [Description adapted from the Feminist Majority Foundation.]

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Carlo Tresca

Carlo Tresca (1879-1943) was an Italian-born American anarchist, newspaper editor, and labor agitator. During the first half of the 20th century, Tresca was a riveting speaker for the Industrial Workers of the World, and put himself on the frontline of some of the most significant labor strikes of the era including Lawrence, Paterson, and Ludlow. He also played a key role in the unsuccessful attempt to save his fellow Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti from execution.

As an editor and journalist for several underground anarchist papers including his own publication, Il Martello (The Hammer), Tresca wrote scathing attacks on labor agents, bankers, consular officials, and priests. In the 1930s, he condemned Stalin’s repressive tactics and particularly, the liquidation of anarchists and other non-communist loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. But his most fervent vitriol was reserved for Italy’s Fascist regime.

Tresca’s relentless war of words against the Fascisti would prove to be the greatest crusade of his life, prompting the Italian Ambassador to the U.S. to request that Tresca be deported or “silenced.” But deportation attempts failed, and the indefatigable Tresca refused to be silenced. When one of his papers was closed down, he’d simply start another. [Description adapted from OnThisDeity.com by Dorian Cope.]

Read more about Tresca in the book Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel by Nunzio Pernicone.

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