A Revolutionary Pilgrimage
To reach the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), almost all the members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation crossed the Atlantic instead of the Pacific. In early July, some met Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers while others joined the group in Paris. They then flew to Moscow and on to North Korea, arriving in the capital, Pyongyang, on 14 July 1970.1 Because the U.S. government forbade entry into the DPRK on American passports, the travelers received visas on a separate piece of paper that they could remove if necessary.2 They were right to be cautious. Cleaver’s FBI file indicated that the U.S. State Department attempted to track the delegation’s movements and ordered investigations of each member for possible violations of national security.3
Despite the surveillance, the Anti-Imperialist Delegation broadcast their intentions and their findings. On the eve of their departure from Moscow, the group held a press conference explaining the purpose of their trip. In the words of Cleaver, they sought to expose “a history of U.S. imperialism in Korea.”4 The mainstream press quoted only Eldridge Cleaver and Robert Scheer, both well-known figures. Alex Hing also conveyed his sense of anticipation by writing a letter to the Asian American movement publication Gidra:
I am here in Moscow with Comrade Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, enroute to North Korea. . . . This is the first delegation to be invited from Amerika by the Koreans. . . . As this is the first such trip by Amerikans and because two Asian Amerikans are on the delegation—sister Pat Sumi from movement for a Democratic Military is with us—the information we will gather and our experiences with the Korean people and Korean culture should be extremely exciting.5
During the delegation’s travels in the DPRK, they were hosted by the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland. The committee had two primary goals: first to educate their visitors about the historic and ongoing intervention of the United States on the Korean peninsula; and second to gain support from the American antiwar movement to unify North and South Korea. As the interviews and writings of the travelers reveal, the visitors were eager to absorb the anti-imperialist message of their hosts. The sites that the delegation visited resulted from mutual consultation. As Hing recalled, “One of the first things we did was sit around with the North Koreans to plan an itinerary.”6
The North Koreans, like the North Vietnamese and the Red Chinese, supported the premise of “people’s diplomacy” and received the travelers like dignitaries. The delegates were treated to banquets and receptions.7 They also had the opportunity to engage in conversation with top governmental officials. Tranh Minh Quoc, who worked for the Vietnam Committee for Solidarity during the war, regularly hosted international delegations in North Vietnam. He recalled that the Cleaver group was a “high-level delegation”; they “held him in high esteem” because of Cleaver’s leadership position in the Black Panthers.8 The access that the Americans had and the treatment that they received contrasted greatly with their status within the United States. As Elaine Brown expressed soon after her return to the United States, “We were welcomed with open arms. And as a matter of fact we were treated as delegates, as diplomats, representing the people as opposed to the government . . . of the United States. . . . For the first time in even our own lives we were treated as human beings and as respected members of the human race.”9
The perceptions of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation provide an opportunity to explore the connections between Third World internationalism and the concept of radical orientalism. The travelers, like other U.S. activists of the time, continued an orientalist practice of cultivating ideas and fantasies about the Orient as the polar opposite of the Occident and using these projections to more clearly define themselves. Their romanticization of Asia differed from traditional Western conceptions of the feudal, stagnant, and exotic Orient. Instead, as radicals who identified with socialist Asian countries, they highlighted the progressive, revolutionary East and contrasted it with the capitalist and militaristic West, or, in Eldridge Cleaver’s words, the “wicked West.”10 Consequently, the experience of traveling in Asia provided an opportunity for American activists to gain a different vantage point on themselves and their home nation. Socialist Asia stimulated the imagination of U.S. radicals by modeling alternative societies based on revolutionary cultural and political values.
Radical orientalism is part of a broader embrace of Third World internationalism by American activists during the 1960s and 1970s. Todd Gitlin, a former SDS activist as well as a sociologist, explains that activists of his generation believed that “America [had] forfeited our love. . . . [Consequently] we needed to feel that someone, somewhere in the world, was fighting the good fight and winning. . . . Increasingly we found our exemplars and heroes in Cuba, in China, in the Third World guerrilla movements . . . [and] most of all—decisively in—Vietnam.”11 As this passage conveys, the “linkage of spirit” between American radicals with Vietnam was part of a broader fascination with the decolonizing and socialist Third World.12 Just as U.S. activists traveled to Vietnam to witness and understand the war, they also went on journeys to Cuba. Beginning in 1969, the Venceremos Brigades mobilized people from the United States and around the world to harvest sugar cane.13 They came to help Cuba meet its economic production goals in spite of the U.S. economic blockade and bans on travel.
Even as American activists embraced solidarity broadly with the socialist Third World, Asia, particularly Vietnam, occupied a distinct status within the American radical imagination. Asia was both closer and more distant for Americans. Asia spawned the earliest successful national liberation movements during the post–World War II era with the formation of the PRC and DPRK. Cuba and many countries in Africa did not achieve independence until the mid- to late 1950s and 1960s. Asia also became the site of overt and massive U.S. military confrontation with the Korean and Vietnam wars. Finally, due to geographical distance, political restrictions, and cultural/linguistic differences, Asia was more difficult for Americans to access, especially compared to Cuba. Despite the difficulties of traveling to the island, thousands participated in the Venceremos Brigades. In contrast, only two hundred people journeyed to Hanoi over the course of the war. Even so, the heroism of Vietnamese people in resisting American military power made them symbolically and emotionally important to U.S. activists. As Gitlin explains, “Visits to ‘the other side’ started as explorations and diplomatic missions and became pilgrimages.”14 Politically motivated journeys offered the possibility of spiritually rejuvenating the souls of American radicals.
The interviews and speeches given by the Anti-Imperialist Delegation soon after their journey reveal how their desire for political insight and transformation shaped their experiences as revolutionary pilgrims. Despite the enthusiasm of the delegates, it is important to recognize that they spent a limited amount of time in each country. They stayed for a month in the DPRK, three weeks in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), and a week total in the PRC. In addition, the travelers’ overall lack of familiarity with these Asian cultures and languages led them to rely on their hosts for information about socialist Asia. In other words, the Anti-Imperialist delegates were in many ways “tourists,” who received a packaged and staged version of revolutionary Asia. Several of the delegates, many years later, expressed the belief that they were presented with carefully crafted views of socialism, particularly during their stay in North Korea. However, their public pronouncements during and soon after their journey conveyed their excitement at seeing these new societies. They sought to reproduce their radical orientalist perspective by emphasizing the destructiveness of U.S. intervention in Asia, the modernity of Asian socialism, and the revolutionary capabilities of Asian women.
In Imperial Eyes, Mary Pratt analyzes the writing of Westerners, most commonly European bourgeois men, who traveled to colonized lands. She illuminates how these visitors from the “metropole” arrived with a sense of “innocence.”15 They did not perceive or understand that their very presence and ability to travel resulted from an ongoing history of diplomatic, military, economic, cultural, and social penetration by the West into the lands that would become the Third World. In contrast, the Anti-Imperialist delegates were eager to understand the destructive impact, the guilt, of Western imperialism in Asia.
The Korean War (1950–53) is often referred to in the United States as the “forgotten war.”16 To counter this cultural amnesia, the Anti-Imperialist travelers were inundated with the history and legacies of the war. In their excursions in the North Korean capital city of Pyongyang, Elaine Brown recalled that they were reminded of how “the U.S. devastated, completely bombed and leveled” the city.17 On one of their earliest stops, the delegation visited the “ ‘Museum of Anti-Japanese Revolutionary Struggle’ where the group viewed pictures taken during the United States war with North Korea and a display of American military debris.”18 The museum also memorialized atrocities committed by the United States, including the mass death of thirty-five thousand people within fifty-two days of war. In a series of radio addresses upon her return to the United States, Brown shared the profound emotional impact of these sites. In Sinchon County,
Figure 7. The Anti-Imperialist Delegation coverage in the Black Panther newspaper, 3 October 1970.
87% of the population was wiped out here. A somber crowd awaited us outside the museum. It was as if the entire village had come out to look at us—there were no salutes, cheers, or clapping here, as there had been everywhere else we had visited. All of them had lost husbands and wives, children and parents and grandparents. The museum itself was modest and shabby—of whitewashed cinderblocks, I think. It had obviously been assembled by the people themselves and was full of, along with photos and other documented evidence, the scraps of the personal possessions of the dead.19
Both the physical remnants and the survivors testified to American atrocities. Brown recalled seeing
the bomb shelters where women and children and old people were herded together and gasoline poured over them and they were burned alive. There are still scratch marks on the walls where they struggled to get out. . . . A woman, whose sister was one of the few survivors of the ordeal, told us that a US officer went to the warehouses and seeing the women and children together, he declared that they looked too happy. This was after they’d been there over a week without food and water. So they separated the women from their children; they put the children into one warehouse and the women in the other. They gave the children gasoline to drink telling them that it was water, so they got violently ill. Then the troops finally set fire to the warehouses, and killed almost everyone in them.20
The recounting of the war from the perspective of the DPRK challenged the dominant narrative of the conflict in the United States. Americans criticized North Koreans for initiating military engagement through their incursion into South Korea in 1950 and justified U.S. intervention as a necessary means to deter communist expansion. In contrast, the DPRK argued that the conflicts in the region resulted from U.S. political and military policies that divided Korea after World War II. According to this interpretation, the United States denied the legitimacy of indigenous nationalist leaders, who tended to be more closely allied with the Soviet Union and the PRC. Instead, the Americans backed a “puppet” South Korean government and military, which would follow the lead of U.S. Cold War policy.
The accounts of the Anti-Imperialist delegates might appear propagandistic. However, historians Bruce Cumings and Michael Cullen Green document that while the North Koreans were certainly not blameless in their conduct, the United States did engage in particularly vicious forms of warfare. According to Cumings, “From early November 1950 on, [General] MacArthur ordered that a wasteland be created between the front and the Chinese border, destroying from the air every ‘installation, factory, city, and village’ over thousands of square miles of North Korean territory.”21 Consequently, “by 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea was completely leveled.”22 In addition to conventional bombs, napalm and other chemical weapons were used as well. On the ground, U.S. forces “thought anyone in ‘white pajamas,’ which they called the Korean native dress might potentially be an enemy. . . . [Consequently] American forces began burning villages suspected of harboring guerillas, and in some cases burned them merely to deny the guerillas hiding places.”23 The racial attitudes of American troops justified these atrocities. One journalist witnessed “an American Marine kill[ing] an elderly civilian as if in a fit of absentmindedness, showing no sign of remorse”; the writer commented that GIs “never spoke of the enemy as though they were people, but as one might speak of apes,” noting that even some correspondents’ “dearest wish was to kill a Korean. ‘Today, . . . I’ll get me a gook.’ ”24
Green further elaborates that “use of the term ‘gook’ was ubiquitous” during the Korean conflict, demonstrating an American fighting mentality that viewed Korean people as less than human. He cites one journalist as saying that U.S. troops referred to “a dead Korean body of whatever sex, uniformed or ununiformed,” simply as “dead Gook” or “good Gook.” Green also notes that the usage of this term could be traced to other militaristic and imperialistic ventures in Asia: “A linguistic cousin of ‘goo-goos,’ which was employed by servicemen to refer to Filipino insurgents at the turn of the century, it emerged in its current form in Korea.”25 The perception of Korean allies and enemies as subhuman justified the dropping of “more than 30,000 tons of napalm on a peninsula about the size of Minnesota” as well as the military strategy of “destroying civilian targets to prevent their real or potential use by the enemy.”26
These characterizations of the American war in Korea resembled those of the U.S. war in Vietnam. The Anti-Imperialist delegates had the opportunity to compare these experiences directly. The group visited the DRV embassy during their stay in Pyongyang to pay their respects and received an unexpected invitation to travel to Hanoi. All of the travelers had engaged in the antiwar movement in the United States. Some were reluctant to prolong their journey beyond the initially allotted time, though. Ann Froines, whose daughter was two and a half that summer, was anxious about being away longer than she originally anticipated. Elaine Brown, who learned that Black Panther Party (BPP) leader Huey Newton was finally released from prison after three years of an international campaign to “free Huey,” also expressed reluctance to continue their travels. However, Eldridge Cleaver and Bob Scheer, as heads of the delegation, disregarded any reservations and decided that the group would accept the invitation. Going to North Vietnam was exciting for many of the political activists. Randy Rappaport explained that she “had friends . . . who had gone to North Vietnam and that was like Mecca.”27
The Anti-Imperialist travelers had all read and heard stories of atrocities committed by American troops. Nevertheless, the impact of meeting someone who experienced the war firsthand was profound. Alex Hing recalled, “We interviewed this one man who was working in his rice field. There were no military targest [sic] anywhere near this rice field. And this U.S. sky rat flew his plane over and threw napalm on him and 2 of his buddies. One was killed, one slightly wounded, and he was completely deformed by napalm. His arms were paralyzed, his face was melted into his body, and he could barely talk. When the weather got a little too hot or cold, he would experience excruciating pain.”28 In addition to this human suffering, Hing noted the environmental impact of chemical warfare, particularly the widespread use of herbicides: “There are sections in Vietnam where not even a blade of grass can grow, and these sections are all in the Mekong Delta, formerly the most densely populated area in the whole world.” Based on his travels, Hing described the American policy in Asia, not just in Vietnam, as one of “genocide and biocide, which is the destruction of all life.”29 Given the extensiveness of American destruction in Vietnam, visitors could easily witness widespread damage and meet individuals who suffered injuries or lost loved ones.
The Anti-Imperialist Delegation’s tour deepened their understanding of the scope of American military incursion into Asia as a whole. In addition to being exposed to the wartime sufferings of the North Vietnamese, the American travelers also met with Laotian and Cambodian leaders during their stay in Hanoi and Peking. Shortly before the Anti-Imperialist Delegation left on their journey, President Nixon publicly announced on 30 April that the United States had invaded Cambodia to target Vietcong bases of operation there. He had in fact ordered secret bombings in Cambodia more than a year earlier. Nixon’s April announcement sparked the largest antiwar demonstrations to date, including the Kent State and Jackson State protests that resulted in the death of six students. Laos, which had been subjected to bombing as early as the Johnson administration, also would be invaded in February 1971. The Anti-Imperialist Delegation learned of this escalation throughout Southeast Asia through conversations with Laotian and Cambodian officials. Pat Sumi recalled visiting the Laos Information Bureau in Hanoi, where they learned the history and ongoing struggles of the Laotians. They also received gifts: “not of gold and diamonds but of struggle. They gave us . . . revolutionary song books, and gifts made from the metal of destroyed American aircraft. . . . As he presented Eldridge Cleaver with a beautiful large vase made from American aircraft debris, the Laotian representative said simply that he was returning part of a death machine transformed into a symbol of life to his American comrade.”30
While the delegation did not experience such emotionally laden encounters during their stay in the PRC, they had the opportunity to meet with Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was living in exile there due to the political instability instigated by the United States in Cambodia.31 As Alex Hing recalled, “The anti-war movement only saw Vietnam as totally unconnected to other struggles in Laos, Cambodia (when we were in China we learned there are liberation struggles going on at very high levels in Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and India).”32
This pan-Asian analysis of U.S. imperialism was significant both for the delegation’s Asian hosts and for the development of an Asian American political consciousness. In the three-front strategy that Trinh Ngoc Thai outlined, forming a united front among Southeast Asian countries was a key component of fighting the U.S. war.33 Both the United States and the DRV recognized that their political and military strategies needed to cross national boundaries. This articulation of a pan-Asian resistance to American imperialism resonated deeply with activists like Alex Hing seeking to create an Asian American political identity. The category “Asian American” emphasized the commonalities between people of Asian ancestry who suffered racial oppression in the United States and also their imagined connection with Asian nations that challenged American imperial power globally.34
Because the American military represented such a destructive force in the eyes of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, the travelers staged protests during their stay in Asia. While in North Korea, they journeyed to the demilitarized zone at Panmunjom, where delegation members demonstrated “in front of American military police.”35 Cleaver’s FBI file indicates that photographs of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation were taken at the site on 24 July 1970.36 In Hanoi, Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine Brown made two radio broadcasts on Voice of Vietnam radio. They urged U.S. troops, particularly African American soldiers, to stop fighting the Vietcong and even to turn their weapons against their own officers. As Brown explained: “What we said in essence is to put down their guns. We told them to desert. We told them that in fact the best thing they could do, if they wanted to, if they had the guts to, would be [to] turn their guns against the people who are giving them orders to kill innocent Vietnamese people, who have not done anything to them and who are not invading California or New York or anything like this.”37
These radio addresses replicated the content of Eldridge Cleaver’s articles that had already appeared in the Black Panther.38 The FBI monitored these broadcasts and writings with particular interest. They sought to verify the statements and determine their impact in order to gather evidence against Cleaver for “attempting to cause insubordination, disloyalty, or refusal of duty by members of the Armed Forces.”39 The concern of the U.S. government no doubt stemmed from the fact that actual incidents of disobedience and even violence against commanding officers were taking place. Between 1969 and 1972, the Department of Defense documented 788 fraggings or attempted fraggings, while a congressional investigation reported 1,016 incidents during the same time period.40 Furthermore, African American soldiers tended to be disproportionately targeted for punishment compared to white soldiers who engaged in similar behavior.
The BPP delegates who appealed to black soldiers to stop fighting the war acted with the endorsement of their Vietnamese hosts. Other African American visitors to North Vietnam also were invited to speak on Radio Hanoi. During their visits, civil rights activists Diane Nash Bevel and Reverend James Lawson also communicated messages of racial and anticolonial solidarity between African Americans and Vietnamese.41 In addition, Vietcong forces and sympathizers encouraged black soldiers not to fight and promised to refrain from shooting them. According to historian James Westheider, “Stories attesting to such special treatment for blacks were widely circulated and were sometimes true.”42
The radio broadcasts were intended not just for American soldiers. They also fostered the morale of the Vietnamese people. As journalist Pham Khac Lam recalled, his stories about the United States focused on revealing the “weakness” of the enemy “so that [his] people . . . [would] go on fighting” and have the belief that they could win.43 The Anti-Imperialist Delegation’s visit, therefore, held great symbolic importance for the North Vietnamese. In fact, they sponsored an “international day of solidarity with the black people of the United States” on 18 August during the delegation’s visit.44 The date had been selected by the Organization for Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to commemorate the 1965 Watts rebellion.45
These ceremonial displays of Third World solidarity were personally moving for members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation. Eldridge Cleaver recalled that he felt a sense of kinship with the Vietnamese. He expressed a special fondness for Premier Pham Van Dong, who granted the delegation a three-hour audience:46
At one reception he paid a personal tribute to me that I will never forget. . . . He did a play on words of the French translation of my book, Soul on Ice. When they put you in an American jail, the slang expression is that you are “on ice.” And the title of my book meant that my soul was in prison—in jail. The French have a different expression for the same experience—a person is not on ice, but he is “in the shadows” (out of the sun). The French title of my book translated Un Noir a l’ombre—“a black in the shadows.” A notable poet in his own right, the premier understood this nuance in the foreign translation and said at this party, “In the West you are a black in the shadows, but here you are a black in the sun.” That touched me deeply—both his awareness of my writing and his sensitivity to my difficulties in being in exile.47
While the North Vietnamese, like the North Koreans and the Red Chinese, emphasized black-Asian solidarity, they also more broadly embraced the philosophy of people’s diplomacy. They repeatedly conveyed to the delegation and to other visitors from the United States that their enmity was directed toward the U.S. government, not the American people. Consequently, they allowed the Anti-Imperialist Delegation the opportunity to bring back to the United States 379 letters from American POWs in North Vietnam, a mail service that other visitors to Hanoi also performed.48
This message of reconciliation was compelling. Pat Sumi had experienced discomfort and embarrassment when exposed to the legacy of Japanese imperialism in Korea. She recalled feeling reluctant to speak Japanese with one of her North Korean hosts, because she did not want to evoke the experience of colonization. In the spirit of the people’s diplomacy, her Asian host focused on the responsibility of the Japanese and American governments in carrying out imperialist policies, not the guilt of the Japanese and American peoples. Alex Hing also reflected on the powerful impact of this message following his return from Vietnam: “Our country had committed so many despicable crimes in that country and yet these people were the warmest, the most loving people that you’d ever meet. They were really genuinely friendly. . . . They made it very clear that even though they took us to these museums and things, and they showed us these sites where we could see the devastation of what the U.S. did, that they harbored no ill feelings for the American people. . . . You go back after that and you dedicate your life to ending the war.”49
Through their travels, the Anti-Imperialist Delegation gained a more visceral and profound understanding of the impact of American policies in Asia. The activists also developed a critique of imperialist worldviews by inverting assumptions regarding modernization and civilization. The gaze of the traveler from the metropole to the colony is frequently the view from an industrialized culture into an allegedly less evolved, more primitive society.50 The socialist countries that the anti-imperialists visited, particularly the DPRK and the PRC, took pains to highlight the modernization of their economy and society. In fact, they modeled an alternative form of modernity, a socialist version that countered Western capitalism. Elaine Brown captured these perspectives in a speech she gave at the University of California, Berkeley, soon after her return to the United States. She reflected that in visiting socialist Asia, “one gets the feeling of being catapulted ahead in time and visiting some sort of future society.”51
The idea that socialist Asia was ahead of Western development challenged fundamental beliefs that most Americans held about their own country and the world. In a radio interview after her return to the United States, Elaine Brown responded to a series of questions regarding North Korea. The queries revealed assumptions regarding the lack of development in Asia, partly due to information that American travelers shared about North Vietnam. The radio interviewer asked, “What kind of a town is Pyongyang? It might as well be on the moon, you know, as far as anybody here knows about it. . . . Everyone who goes to Hanoi has expressed wonderment that this is really a sort of small town. . . . Is the agricultural sector of the [North Korean] country . . . still fairly primitive, as far as instruments and that kind of thing is concerned? . . . In North Vietnam the agricultural methods are still fairly simple and it’s done in the traditional way as I understand it.”52
In response, Brown emphasized the industrial, agricultural, and social development of the DPRK: “Pyongyang is a major, large city. It’s a very beautiful city. There are many new buildings. . . . I don’t have the exact figures. But it is a large city and you don’t have the feeling that this is some underdeveloped country. This is a highly developed, industrial, agricultural state.”53 In contrast to the United States, “there were no homeless beggars on the streets of Pyongyang, no prostitutes, no hustlers. There were no gambling houses or cheap bars, no rundown houses or apartment buildings. Connected to every workplace were a free clinic and a free child-care facility or school.”54 Even in the rural regions, “the entire countryside has electricity, in all houses and so forth. . . . And in comparison to the United States . . . the people who live on cooperative farms actually live on a much higher living standard . . . because each person, for example, is provided already with health care and medical facilities, with childcare, with housing, with some clothing allotment, with a free educational system up through what we would call high school and even college education. So that the so-called peasant is not living at a low standard at all.”55
Brown’s statements sound propagandistic and no doubt reflect the selective experiences that she had during her stay in North Korea. Many years after the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, members expressed skepticism toward the constant references to Kim Il Sung, who was credited for all the positive developments in North Korea. However, some of Brown’s impressions of the society and economy in the DPRK are corroborated by historian Bruce Cumings. Previously industrialized under Japanese colonialism, the country formulated economic plans throughout the 1950s and 1960s to focus on “reconstruction and development of major industries devastated by the war.”56 As a result, their “industry grew at 25 percent per annum in the decade after the Korean War, according to external observers, and about 14 percent from 1965–78.”57 The DPRK’s economy actually outperformed its southern counterpart during this time period, despite the massive amount of U.S. aid given to South Korea’s economy.58 By 1965, “American economic and military aid still accounted for about 75 percent of the South’s military budget, 50 percent of the civil budget, and nearly 80 percent of the available foreign exchange.”59 However, during “the period 1945–60 it was rare to find any American official who thought the ROK [Republic of Korea] would become ‘economically viable.’ ”60 In contrast to South Korea’s dependency on the United States, the North Koreans accepted aid from the Soviet Union and China but mainly sought to create “an independent, self-contained economy,” even from other socialist nations.61 In its restructuring, the DPRK deprioritized consumer goods and focused on providing social welfare. According to Cumings, even the “World Health Organization and other UN agencies praise the delivery of basic health services; North Korean children are better vaccinated against disease by far than are American children.”62
The Anti-Imperialist delegates were particularly impressed by the education and resources available for children in the DPRK. As Elaine Brown explained, “You notice that the Korean people put great emphasis on the youth because, of course, the youth are future generations to continue the society.”63 Her interest in children no doubt partly stemmed from becoming a new mother herself and partly from the Black Panthers’ outreach to community children through their free breakfast and educational programs. Alex Hing described in detail their visits to “children’s palaces,” which were constructed “not only in the largest cities but also in the most mountainous, rural villages”:
Children between the ages of 7–12 can attend these palaces, organize their own activities, for about 4 months at a time. Children go there after school, on weekends, and during vacations. One we visited in Pyongyang was as big as a large-size university building, and had an agricultural cooperative connected to it outside the city, and a zoo, too. . . .
By the time they reach 9 years of age, children are taught to play 3 instruments well enough to play for concerts. Children are taught to dismantle weapons, embroider, paint, sculpture, dance, sing, do mathematics, understand an entire economic system, and the entire production process of one factory. The worker in the U.S. has no conception of what his job is . . . all he knows is you put this bolt in this hole all day long. In Korea a child is taught the entire production process of 5 or 6 different products by the time he is 9. He learns to make vinylon, a Korean discovery, because they couldn’t grow cotton, they make a synthetic out of rock. A 9 year old can explain the entire process of converting limestone into vinylon.64
This extensive system of child care and education that the DPRK created was part of their revolutionary goal of reformulating family and gender roles in order to create a new socialist citizenry. Kyung Ae Park argues that “as early as 1946, North Korea . . . instituted various policies regarding women’s emancipation . . . aim[ed] at three basic goals: liberation from the patriarchal family and social system; liberation through social labor; and the creation of a socialist woman.”65 Kim Il Sung himself “advocated that the state should take steps to rear children under public care in order to encourage women to take part in public life.”66 As a result, the numbers of nurseries and kindergartens grew from 12 and 116 respectively in 1949 to the capacity for “almost 100 percent of the 3.5 million children” to “enter more than 60,000 nurseries and kindergartens” by 1976.67 The new child care system enabled parental, particularly maternal, involvement in public life, especially in the realm of economic production. In addition, the educational system helped to create new socialist male and female subjects in the next generation.
In the DPRK, the Anti-Imperialist delegates encountered a society that was both modern and fundamentally different in values than the United States. As Hing gushed in a second letter to Gidra magazine at the conclusion of their stay, “So many stupendous things have happened to me here in Korea that cannot possible [sic] fit within the framework of this letter. Suffice it to say that the Socialist countries in Asia are probably the bastion of world civilization.”68
The delegation’s visit to the PRC reinforced the message that socialist Asia represented an alternative modernity to the United States. Traveling to China was particularly moving for Hing, who claimed to have initiated their trip there. When the Anti-Imperialist Delegation was asked where they would like to visit during their stay in the DPRK, he immediately requested to see the PRC embassy. His demand was a source of embarrassment for Eldridge Cleaver. Despite the popular understanding in the United States of the monolithic nature of communism, the DPRK and the PRC had ongoing tensions. Cleaver was concerned that Hing might have offended their North Korean hosts. However, as a result of Hing’s request, the entire delegation not only visited the Chinese embassy but also received an invitation to visit the PRC itself.69 They traveled through China to visit North Vietnam but then returned for a lengthier stay on 3 September.70 Hing recalled his exchange with the Chinese embassy in one of his letters to Gidra: “The representative of the People’s Republic of China expressed solidarity with the anti-U.S. imperialist struggle with Amerika on behalf of the 700 million Chinese people. I, on behalf of the 300 thousand Chinese-Amerikans, expressed our wishes that Chairman Mao live ten thousand years!”71 Hing remembered years later that when he arrived in his ancestral land, he “literally got off the plane and kissed the ground.”72
The sheer size of the Chinese population impressed upon the delegates that this nation and its people would play an important role on the world stage. While the DPRK had approximately forty million people, the PRC was home to seven hundred million. As Elaine Brown reflected, with a nation that size, “you know that the Chinese people are not going to tolerate any kind of aggressive act by the U.S. imperialists.”73 Seeking to impress their Chinese hosts, Eldridge Cleaver attempted to exaggerate the number of African Americans. As he recalled, “The U.S. government used to say that there were 25 million blacks in the country. The Panther figure was 35 million—we wanted to have a power base, so we included the people who were passing as whites. But under these oriental circumstances, I said, ‘About 40 million blacks in America.’ The Chinese expert stared at me a minute and said quietly, ‘Ah, we have some villages that size.’ ”74 The Chinese representative no doubt exaggerated as well or perhaps they miscommunicated about numbers.75 Even so, Brown recalled being impressed with the social organization of the sizable Chinese capital. She shared: “Peking is a tremendous city. I believe there’s a population of about 6 or 7 million. That’s almost the population of New York, and yet its [sic] not like New York, because the people are not squashed into housing. The land space is plenty enough for them to live comfortably. . . . If people were to be really concerned with each other and if governments were concerned with their people, of course, people wouldn’t have to live like that.”76 Again, the delegates’ limited stay in socialist Asia, particularly in China where they only visited for a week, gave them a rather selective view. In addition, their previous experiences with urban slums and rural poverty in the United States led the travelers to speak glowingly about alternative ways to organize society.
Even the underdevelopment of DRV did not deter the Anti-Imperialist delegates from celebrating the potential of socialist Asia. As Elaine Brown explained, “The main thing that you see is the fact that the Vietnamese people have been stifled in their growth. They achieved liberation, but yet they have not been able to move within, in terms of socialist construction . . . because of the fact they’re of course occupied. . . . They cannot put their full emphasis and full concentration on developing the society in terms of agriculture and industry.”77 Even under conditions of war, Brown stressed that “they’re building factories. . . . And they have cooperative farms, and hospitals.”78
In North Vietnam, what most impressed the delegates was not necessarily their attempts to achieve modernity but their efforts to combat U.S. technological might with limited resources. As Pat Sumi reflected:
One of the things that I learned from the Vietnamese is that you can win with superior thinking and not necessarily with superior technology. . . . When the bombers came [to one of the villages], it was just at first a shattering experience with the noise, the power of the bombs, the destruction, the killing, the strafing of livestock, and the strafing of old people, women, and children as they ran for cover. The use of napalm, and all of these things. . . . Certainly they [the villagers] had had to fight the French, but their total armaments consisted of a couple of ancient M-1 carbines, single-load carbines, where you put in one, you shoot it, pop it out, and put in another. When the bombers came, people were terrified, people were angry, and they immediately demanded [of] the party structure and the local government that the national government and the national party do something to protect them. They asked them to send the more arms and send them anti-aircraft weapons and so on, and the government said, “We will, as soon as we have them, but this is going to be a long time. You’re going to have to find some way to do it yourself, because we don’t have guns and we don’t have anti-aircraft at this point, and such as we have we have around a hundred at Hai Phong to protect the big cities.” . . . So I was told that this village had a big meeting about “What are we going to do? The government can’t help us, right now. We’re going to have to do something,” and one old man told me “We adopted as our slogan, when the airplanes come, should we look up and study the airplanes or should we look down and run” and he said “We all decided to look up. The only way we could defeat the airplanes was by knowing more about the airplanes than we did, because we could not match them technologically.79
After observing the planes, the villagers developed a sense of the flight patterns, which allowed them to farm without fear of attacks at certain times of the day. They also tested their carbines and discovered the limited range of these weapons. Through the use of human decoys, some of whom lost their lives in an effort to lure the planes into range, the villagers ultimately shot down two American fighter planes.
The underdog status of these Vietnamese villagers underscored the message that the entire war conveyed to the American public. The DRV and the Vietcong lacked the technological weaponry of the U.S. military, but they were winning the war or at least fighting the United States to a stalemate. As Sumi explained, the Vietnamese “were successful because they used superior knowledge, courage and determination and love to do it.”80 When she praised them for their ingenuity and questioned whether she had the capability to replicate their revolutionary spirit, her hosts responded, “No, you’re just like us, and we’re just like you. Nobody would allow this to happen to their own country without fighting, by whatever means possible. Even with your bare hands you would fight.”81 While the DPRK and the PRC represented socialist alternatives to modernization, the DRV served as a reminder not to underestimate the seeming “primitiveness” and “backwardness” of Asian society.
The theme of the oppressed overcoming their oppressors was also embedded in the delegation’s final method of subverting the imperialist gaze. In classic orientalist travel narratives, the colonial destination tends to serve as a site for interracial erotic conquest. As exemplified by the Madame Butterfly storyline, these interactions usually occur between Western male travelers and “native” women. These non-Western women offer food, medicine, and cultural knowledge as well as sexual companionship during the duration of the traveler’s stay. All this, and these women have little power to protest when their Western lovers decide to leave.82 This portrayal of eroticized cooperation and submission symbolically represents the geopolitical status of the colony in relation to the metropole. In contrast, the Anti-Imperialist Delegation and their socialist hosts highlighted the role of Asian women in liberating and rebuilding their motherlands.
The focus on revolutionary womanhood stemmed from the interests of both the American travelers and the socialist Asian societies that they visited. The predominantly female composition of the delegation and the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the United States by the late 1960s inevitably led to discussions among the travelers regarding gender roles. In fact, when the delegation was in Moscow, they “made tape recordings explaining their activist histories and why they believed traveling to North Korea was significant for them personally.”83 Ann Froines noted, “The taping session was the beginning of a 2-hour discussion which broke through a lot of shit, especially on the women question. The group felt closer, more coherent.”84 All of the female travelers were eager to learn more about women in socialist societies. Even before Elaine Brown’s visit to Asia, she was exposed to the exemplary abilities of revolutionary Vietnamese women. Images and discussions of their accomplishments appeared in the Black Panther newspaper.85 Furthermore, they were part of the BPP curriculum. When Brown first joined the BPP, she attended the mandatory classes taught by Ericka Huggins, who offered these instructions regarding the ideal female revolutionary: “Ericka told us point-blank that as women we might have to have a sexual encounter with ‘the enemy’ at night and slit his throat in the morning—at which we all groaned. She reminded us of the Vietnamese guerrilla women, who were not only carrying guns but using their very bodies against the American forces. . . . Our gender was but another weapon, another tool of the revolution.”86
This portrayal of Vietnamese women as devious and sexual predators evokes popular depictions of Asian women as both “dragon ladies” and “prostitutes,” representations that circulated both in the American public and among U.S. soldiers. As Heather Marie Stur points out, “the idea of the dragon lady” who is simultaneously seductive and deadly builds upon previous orientalist depictions of Asian women and reveals the ambivalence of the American military toward their role in Vietnam.87 The image of the alluring yet dangerous Vietnamese woman symbolized the broader country. American troops were there to “protect” South Vietnam, but the inhabitants also had the potential to betray their masculine rescuers. The Black Panthers, according to Elaine Brown, renarrated this GI cautionary tale of seduction and betrayal to emphasize the revolutionary capacity of Vietnamese women.
The interest of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation in female roles was matched by the efforts of their hosts to emphasize the importance of women in socialist revolution. Each country had a specific organization, like the Vietnam Women’s Union, that focused on women’s issues and engaged foreign visitors in discussion about their status and concerns.88 In fact, the union had a long history of establishing contacts with international women’s peace groups.89 Pat Sumi recalled the impact of their conversations: “In every country we went to, everyone kept telling us that women are half the population, and if we all rose up at once, the revolution would be over. So organizing women is very important.”90
The women’s organizations in socialist Asian countries did not reinforce the dragon lady depiction of Asian women but instead emphasized the revolutionary potential of peasant and working women. The Asian hosts focused on the importance of understanding that female liberation involved overturning “triple oppression.” As Sumi explained, women “were oppressed by the imperialists, colonialists (French, Japanese, etc.) and they were oppressed by the national bourgeoisie of each country which maintained capitalist oppression over them, and they were also oppressed within their own families and cultures.”91 As a result of the overlapping nature of these hierarchies, the Asian socialists emphasized that “women cannot possibly be liberated until the whole country is liberated, not only from imperialism but also from capitalism.” Consequently, “women have to organize each other about things that will enlighten women about the entire liberation struggle.”92 These Asian socialist critiques that embedded women’s liberation within class and national liberations resonated with the analysis of the BPP and for women of color in the late 1960s and 1970s. They tended to view women’s liberation in the United States as mainly a white, middle-class movement that did not take into account racial discrimination and class oppression.
By visiting established socialist countries like the DPRK and the PRC, the delegation observed how these societies enabled more equal participation for women in society. Alex Hing recalled how “women in Korea and China have incredible day care centers. Every factory and collective farm or commune has a kindergarten and a nursery, where if a mother wants to, she can drop off her kid Monday morning and pick him up Friday night. In the U.S., if a mother has 3 kids she’s washed up. . . . she has to take care of the kids, she can’t work. In Korea and China, if a mother has 3 kids, she can work 6 hours and get paid for 8. During pregnancy in Korea, women get 66 days off, and in China I think it’s 56 days.”93 In addition to day care centers, Pat Sumi also noted the availability of services that made household chores more convenient for women: “In Korea, they have restaurants attached to the factory where you can order food in the morning and pick it up in the evening hot, and take it across the street for your family’s dinner. So you don’t have to spend 2 hours fixing dinner. You can do other things.”94 The comments of both Hing and Sumi suggest that these services were established to free women from the responsibilities of cooking and caring for children in order to engage in productive labor, such as working in a factory or on a farm. Their reports do not indicate that men should learn to share in these family responsibilities or that some women may choose not to marry or have children.
Scholars of North Korea also note the contradiction between policies that state the goals of female liberation and economic integration along with the persistence of patriarchal norms that construct women’s roles primarily through maternity.95 Soon after the DPRK was founded, legislation was passed to grant women economic rights, such as the right to own land, the right to work, and maternity benefits. After the widespread destruction of the Korean War, the North Korean government valued women as both producers and reproducers. Women contributed to the development of a new socialist economy, constituting “54.9 percent” of the labor force by 1965; in addition, “women in North Korea were under strong pressure to produce more children.”96 In 1970, the year that the Anti-Imperialist Delegation visited North Korea, the “Fifth Congress of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) made freeing women from the heavy burden of the household a major goal of the party.”97 Even as the socialist state established service industries, like child care and food service, to alleviate some of the double burden, North Korean leaders still expected women to serve as the primary cultural reproducers of the family. As Kim Il Sung stated in 1971, “The mother has to bear the major responsibility for home education. Her responsibility is greater than the father’s . . . because it is she who gives birth to children and brings them up.”98
Due to the incomplete gender revolution in Socialist Asia, which prioritized “material liberation” or “the ability [of women] to work and do activities equal to men,” the Anti-Imperialist Delegation were eager to observe how these societies promoted “cultural liberation,” which strived to change people’s understandings of gender roles.99 In China, Pat Sumi credited the Cultural Revolution for challenging the social hierarchy and thereby transforming gender hierarchy. The Cultural Revolution
liberated everyone from all the old, capitalist, bourgeois ideology and behavior patterns and established a whole new set which are infinitely more humane, equalitarian, democratic, and liberated than the old bourgeois patterns were. Every human being is a creative and beautiful and complete human being able to make collective contributions to the well-being of all the other human beings on the planet earth. Women in China have gone through this whole thing. They dress almost like men do, jackets and slacks, because it’s more convenient. They have no fears in meetings about speaking up. It doesn’t mean that all the difference between sexes have been erased or that romantic love has been erased. Politically and ideologically people are equal and united as a class.100
Sumi’s perception of the Cultural Revolution reflected an idealized and limited understanding of this period of Chinese history. As the youthful Red Guard and various factions within the political elite sought to transform Chinese feudal culture, they also caused widespread suffering and persecution.
At the time that the delegation visited the PRC, though, Elaine Brown also commented on the sense of political solidarity and equality that was conveyed by women and men dressing in a similar manner:
The Chinese people are strong and they are determined to work toward world revolution. . . . The women all wear pants and they’re not involved with clothing. They wear good clothing, very simple, very plain, and very pretty too. When we arrived back in New York, having left Peking not too long before that, it almost looked like walking into the snake pit. Because you see all kinds of madness. Everybody dressed in 15 different ways, and people looked confused. And when you’re in China everything is clear, everyone is beautiful.101
Again, Brown’s reference point was not just what she was observing in China but how her travels contrasted with certain practices and values that she associated with the United States.
Scholar Emily Honig notes the tendency to overlook the complex impact of gender during the Cultural Revolution. She points out that officially both “feminism and femininity were rejected. Feminism, or any discussion of women’s specific problems, was declared bourgeois; femininity, or any assertion of a specifically female identity, was denounced.”102 Instead, the image of “the Iron Girls—strong, robust, muscular women who boldly performed physically demanding jobs traditionally done by men—were celebrated.”103 External visitors tended to applaud “the plain-colored loose-fitting clothes worn by men and women alike for preventing the sexual objectification of women that they so abhorred in their own countries.”104 Some Chinese women did experience empowerment through these public transformations of gender roles and gender presentation. However, they were encouraged to emulate masculinity in the name of gender neutrality. Also, various forms of gender inequality persisted, particularly in the familial and sexual realms.
Not all the women in the Anti-Imperialist Delegation were as enamored of what they learned on the tour. Ann Froines noted during her stay in North Korea:
We do not have enough information to do a very good article on women. We’ve seen some remarkable women, seen women in roles very different and “liberated,” observed the remarkable benefits the state provides . . . but—we don’t know about women
1) in politics
2) in the family
3) in self-defense units, militia
Where are the Madame Binhs? It is very hard to say what women have to look forward to in the way of liberation.105
Froines’s frustrations reflected the incompleteness of female liberation in North Korea. While women constituted a sizable portion of the economic workforce, they still lacked “equal ‘power of property.’ ”106 In addition, women in the DPRK constituted distinct minorities in the political realm and the military. Kyung Ae Park argues they lacked “power of position and the power of force.”107 While “a handful of women played a part in the political leadership hierarchy,” their status “was not the institutionalization of women’s power but a ‘star system’ ” that recognized individual women.108
At the same time that Froines expressed disappointment, her query “Where are the Madame Binhs?” reveals her eagerness to learn from socialist female role models. Nguyen Thi Binh was the foreign minister of the Provisionary Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (created by the National Liberation Front) and their chief negotiator at the Paris peace talks.109 She was widely recognized among American female activists, mainly because she helped to initiate and maintain connections with U.S. women’s peace groups. In addition, she served as a role model because she occupied such a significant position of leadership. Perhaps due to her greater visibility and influential position, Binh’s “star power” was more convincing as an indicator of broader transformations of gender roles in Vietnam.
The female Anti-Imperialist delegates gave their highest praise to, and told their most adulatory stories about, women, not in the established socialist societies of the DPRK and the PRC, but in Vietnam, where they contributed centrally to the struggles for independence. As Pat Sumi explained: “Women in Vietnam have a tradition of being liberation fighters. . . . We met this 17 year old woman. In her village there was an all-woman guerilla unit that shot down 2 American airplanes, while taking responsibility for the rice fields around the battery where the anti-aircraft guns are. They produced more on that rice field than any other comparable plot in the village. And the whole group sang poetry and songs for us.”110 Sumi exalted these Asian female warriors, whom she portrayed as exemplary fighters, farmers, and folk artists. In contrast, Elaine Brown emphasized the tragic nature of the war in Vietnam, which forced “young women . . . sixteen and seventeen years old . . . [to spend their lives] watching the sky for U.S. planes to come back. When of course 16 and 17-year old women, girls here don’t have to do that. . . . This shouldn’t be part of a 16-year old girl’s life—to have spent practically all of her life, from the time say since she was 10 years old, involved in watching the skies for planes coming over for possible bombings.”111 One widely circulated image in U.S. movement newspapers captures the sense of vulnerability and strength of Vietnamese women. Publications like the Black Panther and Gidra featured the same drawing of an Asian female peasant, cradling a rifle in one arm and a baby in the other.112 She appears equally ready to engage in armed struggle and to nurture her child. In fact, the image suggests that in order to fulfill her role as a mother, the female peasant must take up arms. As a symbol of revolutionary womanhood and motherhood, she conveys the interconnectedness of multiple liberations: by fighting for her family, her class, and her nation, the female peasant also frees herself.
Figure 8. Peasant woman with baby and gun. Cover of Gidra, March 1970, reproduced in Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu, eds., Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2001, p. 17.
The transformation of gender roles appeared more complete in Vietnam, where women visibly and heroically obtained power of property, position, and force. Two arguments could be made to explain Vietnamese exceptionalism. First, the Vietnamese proclaimed a distinct nationalist tradition of female liberation fighters. They traced this legacy all the way to “the Trung sisters,” who combated Chinese imperialism “in C.E. 40” and became nationalist “martyrs to the cause of Vietnam.”113 Sandra Taylor, in her interviews with Vietnamese women who fought in wars of liberation against the French and the United States, points out that these women “drew on their land’s 2,000-year history as well as the very recent past.”114 In addition to this folk national history, which provided female role models of leadership, Vietnam was engaged in an ongoing hot war. A saying commonly repeated during the war was, “When war comes, even women have to fight.”115 Cynthia Enloe and other scholars have argued that wartime conditions commonly necessitate gender experimentation; in contrast, the postwar periods of societal reconstruction frequently result in gender regression.116
In the midst of the U.S. war in Vietnam, women were mobilized through nationalist folklore and wartime propaganda. The Vietnamese Communist Party encouraged women to do so by assuming three responsibilities. “She took responsibility for her household and raised her children, she carried on production so the soldiers could be fed, and she fought in place of her husband when he went off to war.”117 As a result of wartime demands, Vietnamese women at the grassroots and elite levels assumed a visible and highly valued role in their societies.
The anti-imperialist gaze of the delegation, which focused on American guilt, Asian modernity, and Vietnamese women warriors, tended to rely on radical orientalist logic to praise socialist Asia and to condemn the United States. In their eyes, Asia continued to represent the contrasting image of the West. However, it was a modernized and revolutionary Asia rather than an exotic, stagnant, mystical Orient. Furthermore, the travelers sought not only to portray socialist Asia but more importantly to point out the flaws of the United States.
The delegation’s perceptions of decolonizing Asia resonated with their hosts’ political agenda. Pham Khac Lam, who wrote about the United States to Vietnamese audiences, also met with international delegations to North Vietnam. He recalled organizing the itineraries with three goals in mind: “First of all, we want them to see . . . the aggression of war . . . [what] is happen[ing] to our people, so that they can . . . tell the situation to the American people . . . [of] the war crimes. . . . Secondly, . . . we want them to see the determination of the Vietnamese to resist the war of aggression. . . . The third thing we want . . . to . . . acknowledge is the peaceful life the Vietnamese want to live when there is no bombing.”118 These goals, in Lam’s eyes, were not distortions of reality but “the real situation . . . the sufferings of the people” and their genuine desire for peace.119
The American travelers, however, had limited time and ability to develop a full and complex understanding of socialist Asia. They visited select sites. In addition, they followed an orientalist tradition of perceiving the East in relation to the West. As Pat Sumi expressed, “One of the things about being raised in an imperialist country is . . . somehow you are almost completely unconscious of your beliefs and values. . . . You think they are so normal that you are unconscious of them. What happens when you go in a delegation like that to a foreign country is you finally become acutely aware of what it means to be American and what it means to be a non-American.”120
The Anti-Imperialist Delegation and the phenomenon of radical orientalism offer new insights into U.S. political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. First, Cleaver’s pilgrimage reveals how socialist Asia served as a beacon of hope for American activists. As the most visible examples of Third World resistance against U.S. imperialism during the Cold War, North Vietnam, Red China, and to a lesser degree North Korea inspired the imaginations of American radicals.121 The concept of radical orientalism can be linked to Bill Mullen’s idea of Afro-orientalism, the political inspiration that decolonizing Asia offered for African Americans more broadly throughout the twentieth century. The “red East” also served as a particularly powerful symbol for activists of other racial backgrounds. Perhaps it resonated most profoundly for Asian American activists who otherwise would be relatively invisible in the American political landscape.
Second, not only did Asian American, African American, and other American activists turn toward socialist Asia for political guidance, they also sought inspiration from those whom they perceived to be the most disempowered. Along with Mao, Ho, and Kim, the figure of the peasant woman warrior also circulated widely within activist circles. The female guerrilla fighter resonated strongly with the growing women’s movement but also with male radicals. She symbolized the ultimate underdog. After all, if female peasants in an underdeveloped nation could beat the most technologically advanced and wealthy country in the world, what might be possible for activists within the United States?
Finally, the political inspiration that socialist Asia and Asian individuals offered for activists globally resulted from a combination of Western desire for revolutionary role models and Eastern effort to foster international solidarity. North Korea, North Vietnam, and Red China consciously sought out allies among citizens of the world. They fought on the battlegrounds and negotiated with heads of state. They also understood the importance of engaging in personal diplomacy and the power of an international people’s movement.