Connecting The Past And The Present: Harvey Dong’s Insights On The Allegations Against Richard Aoki

I would say that by latching onto this issue, the conservative media is helping promote a certain summation of the 60s and 70s. I think Rosenfeld himself is part of that conservative media and he has that summation also. If you look at his book he makes a sharp dichotomy between the politics of the Free Speech Movement, which actually happened in 1964, and the politics of the Third World Liberation Front, which took place in 1968 at SF State and continued on the UC Berkeley campus in 1969. Whole different time period, whole different move in terms of the nation, whole different move in terms how politicians and how the government viewed social movements.

Because basically, in ’68-’69 there was severe political repression on the movement, and the movements were in a much different place. I would not make the dichotomy between the Free Speech Movement and the Third World Liberation Front because the Free Speech Movement found its roots out of the Civil Rights Movement. Students didn’t have civil rights and fought for civil rights using the strategies and tactics of that time. Then, from ’64 to ’68, the country was changing a lot.

You had the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in ’68, and you had this huge escalation of the war in Vietnam. There was a lot of questioning and challenging about where the country was at. There was a lot of turmoil in the country and, because of that, you had even more people, beyond just the numbers of the FSM, coming out in active protest wanting to change things, wanting to put forth their own demands, wanting things such as Ethnic Studies type of programs.

Richard Aoki at a demonstration supporting Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party via BASICSnews.ca

TK: What Aoki represented politically is essential and should not be overshadowed by the emphasis on him providing the Panthers with their first firearms.

HD: I always try to bring out that was not the primary part of the Panthers. When they went out on those patrols there was a lot of police brutality, so what they did was they carried unloaded guns as a symbol of self-defense–and they also brought with them law books, and they brought with them cameras. Those patrols, from what I understood, did bring a lot of attention on the issue of police brutality because that was what was needed at that point in time.

But I do notice that people tend to look at the gun part as something romantic or revolutionary, where if you look at that a little bit too much it can kind of lead towards a pretty narrow and dangerous path by itself. It’s always the political part that’s the most important…Richard was not the main supplier of guns to the Panthers.

In fact, if anything, the guns that he donated were not even that functional as weapons. It was more symbolic. And then the other thing is, in terms of politics and someone’s theory versus the person, I think for someone like Richard his politics had to do with his positions in terms of working with people, uniting with people. It’s not like a theory that’s in isolation. It’s something that he actually tried to apply in everyday life. Like the presidential election: should he vote Republican or Democrat? Richard told me that he didn’t vote for Obama because he felt that the most important thing was to build the mass movement. He didn’t want to just rely on the two-party system itself because he didn’t think that that was where change was most effective.

TK: In your interview with KPFA’s Apex Express, you talked about Rosenfeld’s claim being an injustice because Aoki has passed. How are such allegations themselves a violence, not just against Aoki, but also against you, me, all peoples of color and our histories of resistance?

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