Journeys for Liberation
Anticitizens, Red Diaper Babies,
and Model Minorities
As Bob Browne exited the antiwar movement for the black power movement, Black Panther Party (BPP) leader Eldridge Cleaver entered the global stage. A charismatic, flamboyant, and controversial figure, Cleaver co-led a delegation of American journalists and activists on a two-and-a-half-month tour of North Korea, North Vietnam, and Red China during the summer of 1970. He wrote about the journey in a poem titled “Gangster Cigarettes”:
I led the forbidden exploration
To mysterious Asia Major
By the U.S. Peoples
Anti-Imperialist Delegation,
A flock of peaceful geese
Sowing seeds against the war,
And resurrecting broken bridges
Over broken faith between
Wicked West and Inscrutable East.1
The “mysterious Asia Major” or socialist Asia was “forbidden” during the Cold War, because the U.S. government had prohibited travel to these countries to contain the spread of communism.2 Even though Bob Browne received special permission to go to Hanoi, the warnings that accompanied this authorization help explain why he did not make the trip during the war. Even as Browne opposed U.S. policies, he was careful not to go too far beyond the pale.
The individuals who participated as members of the U.S. People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation were more radical critics of U.S. military and political policies.3 The eleven-person delegation included representatives from a cross-section of American social movements, including the black liberation, antiwar, women’s liberation, alternative media, and, significantly, Asian American movements. Appropriating President Eisenhower’s concept of “people’s diplomacy,” they challenged the ability of the U.S. government to represent their interests.4 Instead, they sought direct, people-to-people contact with socialist Asian societies.
The Anti-Imperialist Delegation both represented and departed from other journeys made by critics of the American war in Vietnam. In Mary Hershberger’s study of these travels, she noted the regularity of these trips, which averaged approximately once a month by 1969.5 Cora Weiss was the key antiwar activist responsible for organizing these journeys.6 In large part due to her efforts, over two hundred Americans visited Hanoi during the war. The travelers included pacifist Dave Dellinger, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader Tom Hayden, and actress Jane Fonda. Each delegation brought back eyewitness accounts of the widespread destruction wrought upon North Vietnam.7 Their firsthand reports helped to generate skepticism of governmental and mainstream media accounts of the war. Their findings also fostered greater humanitarian compassion for the victims of U.S. military and technological might. In addition, the delegations made efforts to contact American POWs, to facilitate communication between these prisoners and their families, and to encourage North Vietnam to release them.
While the Anti-Imperialist Delegation also espoused opposition to the American war in Vietnam, the itinerary, political ideology, and composition of the group set them apart from previous travelers to Hanoi. They initially only intended to visit the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), a country that was relatively unknown even within activist circles. At the time, Vietnam constituted the most visible hot spot of U.S. military engagement and stalemate. By 1970, the antiwar movement had gained both numbers and visibility through a series of local, regional, and national protests. The surprise attacks launched by the Vietcong against the South Vietnamese and American forces during the 1968 Tet or lunar New Year was a major turning point. The Tet Offensive raised serious doubts among mainstream politicians, pundits, and the general public about whether the United States could successfully and quickly end the war, as Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson and top military leaders claimed. Within a year of Republican President Nixon entering the White House, opinion polls indicated for the first time that a majority of the U.S. public favored withdrawal.8 This position was in line with the goals articulated by the antiwar movement as well as Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy of shifting the fighting burden to South Vietnamese forces. Even though many American disapproved of the antiwar movement, they did not want U.S. forces to stay in Vietnam. Americans also were well aware of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The country was poised to become a political superpower with its vast population, geographical size, socialist ideology, and nuclear weaponry.
In contrast, despite the publicity generated by the capture of a U.S. spy ship, the USS Pueblo, by the North Koreans in January 1968, there was relatively little awareness about Korea.9 Consequently, the members of the delegation sought to bring attention to the parallels between American policies toward Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia. The United States played a central role in dividing both Korea and Vietnam following the collapse of the Japanese and French empires in the aftermath of World War II. American diplomatic, economic, and military interventions also maintained these geopolitical boundaries in the context of the Cold War.
The destination of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation highlighted the motivation of the travelers. By consciously designating themselves anti-imperialists, the members separated themselves from pacifist activists. As one delegate, Alex Hing, explained, “If you have an anti-war movement, that might mean you would be against all wars, against the liberation wars of the people of the world, against all just wars. But if we take an anti-imperialist stand, then we clearly support the liberation struggles of the people of the world. In fact, we want the Vietnamese to win against U.S. imperialism, and we are against unjust wars of aggression.”10 In other words, the Anti-Imperialist Delegation was not, as Eldridge Cleaver claims, “a flock of peaceful geese.” They were not the “loyal opposition,” a term used by author James W. Clinton. A former career U.S. Air Force officer who supported the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, Clinton chose to interview antiwar activists who visited North Vietnam. Although he had previously regarded these individuals as treasonous, he concluded that they “are not, and were never, disloyal Americans but rather citizens who saw the war in different terms.”11 The motives of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation also differed from Mary Hershberger’s analysis that for travelers to Hanoi “their domestic goal was reform, not revolution.”12 Rather, members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation tended to view the U.S. government as fundamentally oppressive and supported the creation of alternative political, economic, and social systems. In essence, they constituted revolutionary travelers. They wanted to gain insight into a new socialist country. Their presence in the DPRK led to invitations to visit the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the PRC. In all three countries, the delegation learned about socialist Asia under hot and cold war conditions.
Finally, the Anti-Imperialist Delegation differed from previous groups due to its composition. Hershberger argues that “almost all of the travelers” to Hanoi “were white,” because “black civil rights figures faced a dilemma that their white counterparts seldom encountered; the Johnson administration put heavy pressure on them to keep silent on Vietnam in return for official support for civil rights legislation at home.”13 Her characterization of the racial background of antiwar travelers highlights the significance of the Cleaver delegation, which was led not by a civil rights activist but by a black radical during the Nixon administration. In fact, a significant portion of the group, four of the eleven members, were people of color, specifically two African Americans—Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine Brown of the BPP—and two Asian American delegates—Alex Hing of the Red Guards, U.S.A. and Pat Sumi of the Movement for a Democratic Military.
Furthermore, a majority of the group—seven delegates—were female. The significant presence of women reflected their engagement and leadership in a variety of movements, including the civil rights, New Left, black power, and women’s movements. Interestingly, only two white men participated in the Anti-Imperialist Delegation. One of them was Robert Scheer, a journalist and longtime collaborator of Eldridge Cleaver’s who also served as the delegation’s co-leader.
The politics and membership of the U.S. People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation provide an opportunity to examine four developments that emerged within activist circles by the late 1960s and early 1970s. First, the delegation offers a case study of how the experience of travel both confirmed preexisting beliefs in and promoted new forms of Third World internationalism, a sense of political solidarity with African, Asian, and Latin American countries. The 1955 Bandung Conference presented the Third World as a group of nations not aligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union. However, as the Anti-Imperialist Delegation’s destinations suggest, American activists who viewed their own government as an imperialist power were drawn to socialist Third World countries.14 In the increasingly rich scholarship on black internationalism, Africa and Cuba tend to serve as the primary sources of inspiration for black activism.15 The Anti-Imperialist Delegation provides an opportunity to consider the centrality of socialist Asia for American internationalists of varying backgrounds, including those of Asian ancestry.16
Second, the composition of the delegation offers a window onto the frequently complex, multiracial, and multiethnic dynamics of 1960s activism.17 By the latter half of the decade, black activists, particularly the Black Panthers, were widely recognized both domestically and internationally as the revolutionary vanguard among U.S. radicals. Committed to empowering African Americans, the Black Panthers also developed political partnerships with a variety of communities. The white delegation members, a significant portion of whom were Jewish, reveal the crucial role that they played in supporting the vanguard status of the Panthers.
In contrast to both black and white activists, Americans of Asian ancestry were rendered largely invisible within movement circles. During the mid- to late 1960s, the mainstream media increasingly depicted Chinese and Japanese in the United States as “model minorities.” The alleged ability of these Asian groups to achieve economic and educational success without resorting to political activism and demands for systemic change was explicitly contrasted with the plight and tactics of African Americans. A 1966 article in U.S. News and World Report offered the opinion that “at a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese-Americans are moving ahead on their own—with no help from anyone else.”18 Similar articles about Japanese Americans appeared as well, and together the two ethnic groups constituted nearly 80 percent of the Asian American populations in the United States in the mid-1960s.19 In this context, the travels of Alex Hing, a Chinese American, and Pat Sumi, a Japanese American, reflected the emergence of a broader Asian American movement that challenged the popular depiction of their groups as apolitical accommodationists. Instead, they emphasized their status as racially oppressed peoples akin to African Americans.20 The presence of Hing and Sumi on a tour led by Eldridge Cleaver symbolized the catalytic significance of black activism for Asian American radicalism. Yet the personal dynamics between individual travelers, which tended not to be aired publicly for the sake of political unity, offer insights into the difficulties of multiracial and multiethnic coalition building.
Third, the significant presence of women, including women of color, in the Anti-Imperialist Delegation also offers an opportunity to examine how men and women differed in their experiences and interpretations of their travels. The female delegates tended to be more interested in the roles of women in Asian socialist societies. They returned with heroic tales, particularly of Vietnamese women, who served as role models for their ability to fulfill their maternal and political responsibilities as well as their nationalist and feminist callings. However, the gender dynamics among the travelers also reveal the difficulty of implementing these more egalitarian ideals even within radical circles.
Finally, the ability of the delegation to travel throughout socialist Asia provides insight into how their Asian hosts cultivated internationalist political networks among American activists of varying racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds. Historian Mary Hershberger points out that the North Vietnamese could not accommodate all the requests from Westerners who wanted to travel to Hanoi. Given the wartime context, the Vietnamese both were deeply concerned about the physical welfare of their potential guests and had limited resources to host these individuals. Even so, the DRV and the National Liberation Front (NLF) in the South recognized the importance of developing allies, not just at the state level but among ordinary people around the world. Both the DRV and the NLF posted communication officers and sent diplomatic missions to Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia, and Canada.21 These representatives communicated not only with heads of state but also with individuals and organizations seeking information about the war in Vietnam. Pham Van Chuong, for example, worked for the Liberation News Agency of the NLF. He was posted in East Berlin during the early to mid-1960s and then was sent to Prague in 1965. Because Czechoslovakia was relatively easy for those from the West to reach, Chuong met with religious and pacifist delegations both in Prague and in other European cities. He recalled meeting well-known antiwar activists Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Staughton Lynd, and Stewart Meacham of the American Friends Services Committee, as well as entertainers Jane Fonda and Dick Gregory.22 In both North and South Vietnam, organizations were established to foster these international relationships. The Vietnam-America Friendship Association was created in 1945, soon after the founding of the DRV. During the U.S. war in Vietnam, the organization became the Vietnam Committee for Solidarity with American People or the Viet-My Committee. A similar organization was created by the NLF.
These citizen diplomacy efforts were perceived as a crucial part of the war effort. Trinh Ngoc Thai, a former delegate at the Paris Peace Talks and the former vice chair of the External Relations Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam, explained that the Vietnamese conceived of fighting the war on multiple fronts. He quoted Ho Chi Minh, who identified two primary fronts: “the first front against the U.S. War in Viet Nam, and the second one is inside the U.S. . The American people fight from inside, the Vietnamese fight from outside.”23 Thai also quoted another Vietnamese leader who conceived of the war in three fronts: “one united front against the U.S. in Viet Nam; one united front of Indochinese nations against the U.S.; and one front formed by the people in the world against U.S. imperialism, for national independence, and peace.”24 In either the two- or three-front formulation, mobilization of American and worldwide public opinion was regarded as an important priority. As Thai notes, “the power of public opinions” could pressure American policy and military leaders. In addition, worldwide support served as “an enormous source of encouragement to the Vietnamese people and their armed forces in the battlefields. The world people’s support was very valuable both spiritually and materially to the Vietnamese people.”25 The Cleaver delegation provides insight into how the North Vietnamese as well as the North Koreans and the Red Chinese attempted to court progressive world opinion to support their politics.
When Eldridge Cleaver, the minister of information for the BPP, initiated the formation of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation in the fall of 1969, he was already in exile from the United States and had been living overseas for nearly a year. His identity as a political refugee from his own country reflected both the particular status of the BPP by the late 1960s and more generally the status of African Americans as “anticitizens” in the United States. In an intellectual history of black freedom movements in the twentieth century, Nikhil Singh posits that African Americans, particularly African American men, have been relegated to a position antithetical of citizens.26 Eldridge Cleaver’s life, a sharp contrast with Bob Browne’s, confirms this observation.
Born in Arkansas to a working-class family in 1935, Cleaver migrated west to California along with tens of thousands of other African Americans who relocated during the World War II period. He grew up in a predominantly working-class Mexican American neighborhood in Los Angeles, where he became involved in gang culture and crime. He eventually served nine years in prison, going in and out beginning in 1954 and finally being released in December 1966, for selling marijuana, attempted rape, and assault with intent to kill. As a member of the multiracial lumpen proletariat found in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles, Cleaver was ripe for recruitment by black nationalist and revolutionary organizations, such as the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers. His transformation from hoodlum to activist brought him national and international fame as his autobiographical work, Soul on Ice, became a best-seller in 1968.27
Cleaver’s conversion to political radicalism and his ascendancy in the BPP accentuated his anticitizenship status in the United States. Founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, the BPP was inspired by a philosophy of armed self-defense and black power. Members initiated community patrols against the police, seeking to monitor and deter police harassment of the predominantly black and working-class residents of Oakland. Their strategy included visibly carrying firearms and following local law enforcement officers in their neighborhoods. When the California State Legislature considered a gun control law to curtail these activities, the Black Panthers protested for their constitutional right to bear arms by appearing en masse in leather jackets and black berets and carrying shotguns at the state assembly in May 1967. Through such theatrical confrontations, the Black Panthers attracted the admiration and enthusiastic support of activists throughout the country. As historian Manning Marable has noted, “by the late 1960’s, the Black Panthers had become the most influential revolutionary nationalist organization in the U.S.”28
One of the converts to the BPP included Elaine Brown, who eventually served as the first female leader of the national organization. Born in 1943 in Philadelphia, Brown grew up in overwhelmingly poor and black neighborhoods, where she socialized with a “gang” of girls and flirted with the “youngbloods.” Had she and Cleaver resided in the same area, they might have encountered one another in this urban street youth culture.29 In contrast to Cleaver, Brown obtained a relatively privileged education. Her mother enrolled her in experimental schools for gifted children as well as an elite girls’ high school. Brown excelled in these academic settings in which she was one of a few students of color. She acquired the cultural capital to be a model and refined citizen. She studied Latin and also learned classical piano and ballet. In recounting this period in her life, Brown also emphasized her sense of cultural negation. She desired to emulate the wealth and “whiteness” of her classmates, many of whom were Jewish. As Brown wrote in her 1994 autobiography, A Taste of Power: “There seemed to be a promise at [school]. . . . It was not in the victory of hitting a number. It was not in the success of stealing a new dress from a dress factory. It was not in a decent piece of meat for dinner or in songs played over a new RCA Victor record player. It was bigger than my mother’s arms. It was a promise with wings that would lift me away from York Street forever and plant me in the security of a white world. I saw that promise and knew I had to join those white people.”30
Brown’s efforts to straddle the predominantly “white” world of school and the “black” world of poor housing projects eventually led to disillusionment and alienation. After a half-hearted attempt at attending Temple University, she relocated to Los Angeles in April 1965. Seeking a new start to her life, Brown found work as a waitress at a strip club that was popular with white celebrities and businessmen. She describes herself as oblivious to racial politics during the mid-1960s, even in the midst of the tumultuous Watts riot during the summer of 1965. In fact, her introduction to civil rights and black liberation politics came from her rich, married white lover, Jay Kennedy, a man whom she met at the strip club. He expressed admiration for African American activism and claimed to help organize and contribute funds to support their causes.31
Brown would personally become involved with the black freedom struggle by teaching piano to inner city youth. Through the process of engaging in community service, she met a variety of black activists and became attracted by their magnetism and vision. The Southern California chapter of the BPP was established by such charismatic leaders as “Bunchy” Carter, a former gang leader, as well as John and Ericka Huggins, described by Brown and others as black “hippies.”32 Brown became absorbed in the life of the party, especially after she had the opportunity to meet the noted author and Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver during one of his visits to Southern California in 1968. Brown focused her initial energies on organizing students at the University of California, Los Angeles, and negotiating university support for BPP community programs. These “serve the people” programs strived to meet the immediate needs of black Angelinos, such as free breakfasts for children and seniors, free health clinics and testing for sickle cell anemia, and free transportation for family members of imprisoned inmates. Through these interactions, Black Panthers sought to transform the political consciousness of those individuals whom they “served,” thereby building a base of support within the African American community.
The BPP’s combined agendas of “armed self-defense” and “serve the people” programs led the police and the FBI to label the BPP as the “most dangerous . . . of all extremist groups.”33 Through the COINTEL, or counterintelligence program, they targeted the organization for infiltration, manufactured and manipulated tensions within the group, and encouraged and executed violent confrontations against members. Eldridge Cleaver’s departure from the United States resulted from this escalating campaign of state repression against the BPP. Two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Cleaver was involved in a police shootout on 6 April 1968, which resulted in the death of seventeen-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton. The minister of information for the Panthers decided to leave the country rather than go back to prison for violating parole. Having experienced a cycle of imprisonment as a youth, Cleaver believed, “when they have you in their clutches, they proceed with what they want to do whether they have a right or not.”34 By then, the organization’s cofounders, minister of defense Huey Newton and chairman Bobby Seale, were deeply entangled in the criminal justice system. Newton had been incarcerated for his involvement in a 1967 shootout that resulted in the death of a policeman. Seale became a defendant in two trials, as one of the Chicago 8 for the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and as one of the New Haven 21, a group of Panthers accused of murdering an infiltrator/informant of the party.35
While living abroad, first in Cuba and then in Algeria, Cleaver took advantage of his exile status to develop connections with Third World socialists and to bolster an internationalist agenda within the BPP. The founders of the party had long been influenced not only by American black leaders such as Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams, but also by Third World revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon, Che Guevera, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Tse-tung.36 The Panthers had sold Mao’s Little Red Book to Berkeley students to obtain funds to purchase their first weapons but became equally influenced by its content. When Elaine Brown joined the Panthers in 1968, she recalled being “given a Red Book to read, a collection of Mao Zedong’s philosophical treatises and statements on revolution and revolutionaries. We were ordered to study his writings, to be prepared to recite portions of them on command, and to distribute his books to the masses.”37 A 1973 internal party memo confirmed the importance of this work, indicating that “50 percent of the morning political education classes concentrated on the ‘little red book.’ ”38 The FBI also noted the significance of Mao for the Panthers, recording in its memos about the organization that “Issues of ‘The Black Panther’ regularly contain quotations from MAO Tse-tung of the People’s Republic of China and features Mao’s statement that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ ”39 Mao’s concept of “serving the people” also influenced the BPP to form their community survival programs. Absorbing the writings of Third World revolutionaries led the Black Panthers to adopt an anti-imperialist critique of American race relations and international policies. They regarded the status of African Americans and other peoples of color within the United States as being analogous to people of color suffering under colonialism.
As a fugitive of the American legal system and a leader of the foremost black radical organization at the time, Cleaver was both a magnet for Third World revolutionary leaders and a potential problem for his host countries. Cuba offered him asylum but, due to persistent concerns regarding American aggression, they also requested that the Black Panther leader avoid drawing public attention to his presence there. They did not fulfill his request for military training facilities to organize a revolutionary force against the United States. Cuban leaders also condemned hijackers who arrived in their country for the express purpose of joining Cleaver in exile.40 Having escaped imprisonment in the States, he discovered that life in Cuba was not without its own kind of limits.
When Cleaver relocated to Algeria, he also experienced tensions with his host country but he gained much greater latitude and support to establish an open Black Panther base of operations there. Being in a socialist Third World nation with formal ties to other Third World countries, Cleaver came into contact with a variety of revolutionary movements, such as Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian liberation movement, Al Fatah; various African liberation movements based in South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, and the Cape Verde Islands; and the NLF of South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese government.41
The Vietnamese were particularly interested in establishing ties with the BPP. Given Cleaver’s stature among American activists and his contacts with the radical press, he represented an important potential ally in their effort to influence American public opinion about the war. Pham Khac Lam, formerly on the secretarial staff of famed General Vo Nguyen Giap during the war against the French, became a member of the Press Department of the Central Committee of Propaganda and Training during the war against the United States. His responsibilities included hosting visitors from the West, such as Tom Hayden, Howard Zinn, and Joan Baez. He also focused his energies on reporting news about the United States for Vietnamese audiences. He reviewed American mainstream newspapers and magazines, seeking information about the U.S. political economy as well as about social protests. He would then write articles on these topics for newspapers in North Vietnam. His goal was to highlight the cleavages within U.S. society, to locate “signs of weakness,” and to offer inspiration for the Vietnamese to continue their struggle for liberation.42 Because of the status of African Americans in the United States, Lam was particularly interested in featuring Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers in Vietnamese news stories. By courting Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, the Vietnamese hoped to shape how the war in Vietnam would be portrayed in the Black Panthers’ influential newspaper. After all, Cleaver remained the minister of information even during exile, and the organization’s publication was widely read by radical activists in the United States and even abroad.
In exchange, the Vietnamese helped to legitimize Cleaver’s standing in the international arena. As he recalled, “The State Department was constantly identifying me as a fugitive from justice, a roving hoodlum or something. They made every effort to lock a criminal identity to my speeches and activities; the Vietnamese not only lent credibility to my overseas operation but intervened on our behalf when the Algerians clamped down.”43 The NLF and the DRV accorded Cleaver the status of a foreign dignitary by regularly inviting him and other members to attend diplomatic ceremonies. They also advocated to the Algerian government that the BPP be given official recognition as an accredited movement, thereby obtaining access to resources for their activities. Furthermore, when the NLF was given new embassy facilities upon the formation of the Provisionary Revolutionary Government in 1969, the Vietnamese persuaded the Algerians to allow Cleaver the use of the vacated space as a Black Panther headquarters. Upon Cleaver’s request, the Vietnamese agreed to offer a prisoner exchange; the release of American POWs for incarcerated BPP members, beginning with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.44 The U.S. government ignored the request, but when Newton eventually obtained his release from prison, he volunteered to send Black Panthers to fight on behalf of the NLF and the DRV.45
It was during his stay in Algeria that Eldridge first developed a relationship with North Korean officials. Motivated by similar considerations as the Vietnamese and recognizing the power of the antiwar movement in the United States, the DPRK ambassador invited Cleaver to attend the International Conference of Revolutionary Journalists, held in their capital of Pyongyang. Cleaver traveled throughout the country for nearly a month during the fall of 1969 to attend the conference, which attracted journalists from ninety countries. During his visit, Cleaver also studied how North Korea interpreted and applied Marxist-Leninist ideology to reconstruct their nation. He was particularly attracted to the concept of juche, roughly translated as self-reliance.46 As a relatively small country, the DPRK was weary of “great power chauvinism” from the Soviet Union and China. Consequently, it sought to develop its own interpretation of socialist revolution. The North Korean innovations encouraged the BPP’s efforts to reinterpret Marxist-Leninism in light of the conditions of the black urban poor in the United States.
In addition to these theoretical exchanges, the DPRK also offered material support for the families of the Black Panthers. The Korean Democratic Women’s Union invited Kathleen Cleaver and Barbara Easley-Cox, both members of the BPP and the wives of Black Panthers Eldridge Cleaver and Don Cox respectively, to stay in their country to complete their pregnancies.47 Kim Il Sung’s wife even sent her private jet to escort Kathleen, her young son, and Barbara from Moscow to Pyongyang. She also visited them after the two women gave birth. In the DPRK, their hosts provided medical care, lodgings, a cook, housekeepers, and child care. Barbara, then pregnant with her first child, was more nervous about the prospect of giving birth than Kathleen, who was having her second. Barbara actually brought issues of Time and Newsweek magazines with articles about the latest medical care and technology for childbirth, hoping that the publications might be helpful for her North Korean doctors and nurses. She also carried a copy of the popular guide to child rearing by Dr. Benjamin Spock, who was an outspoken critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam. The two women and their children mainly stayed in the house that they were provided. When they did go out, they attracted attention with their big Afros and miniskirts.48 The DPRK offer to support the formation of families among Black Panthers contrasted sharply with the inability of the same individuals to create a secure home and community in the United States.
Influenced by his stay in Korea, Eldridge used the party newspaper, the Black Panther, to educate members and readers about North Korea and to highlight Kim Il Sung’s support for the black liberation struggle in the United States.49 In fact, the image of Kim Il Sung would join the portraits of Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevera, and Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on the masthead of the international section of the newspaper; this section was created by Cleaver during his time in exile.50 At some point in his 1969 stay in the DPRK, officials asked him to return with a delegation of American journalists to visit their country. They hoped to enlist the U.S. radical press to support their efforts to reunite North and South Korea.51
Figure 5. Kathleen and Joju Younghi Cleaver. Photo taken in the early 1970s at the children’s nursery of the International section of the Black Panther Party in Algeria. Courtesy of Bill Jennings and It’s About Time: The Black Panther Party Legacy and Alumni project.
Figure 6. The International News masthead of the Black Panther newspaper, 3 October 1970. The face of Mao Tse-tung was added following the end of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation tour. Courtesy of Bill Jennings and It’s About Time: The Black Panther Party Legacy and Alumni project.
The U.S. People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation, which eventually traveled to the DPRK in the summer of 1970, reflected an array of political movements that had emerged in the United States and had developed relationships, however tangentially, with the BPP. Cleaver consulted with his longtime collaborator Robert Scheer to create the roster of travelers. Elaine Brown believed that Eldridge Cleaver personally requested her presence on the trip. Following the assassinations of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in January 1969 by US, a black nationalist organization in Los Angeles, Brown had increasingly taken a leadership role in Southern California. Deemed “an effective party propagandist,” she had become “deputy minister of information” for her chapter.52 Although Brown had given birth just four months prior to the trip, she agreed to travel with Cleaver as the only other representative from the BPP.
Brown and Cleaver, targeted black activists within the U.S. context, sought inspiration and recognition by traveling abroad. They were not the only Panthers to do so. Other members of the organization journeyed to Europe, Africa, Latin American, Canada, Australia, and Asia to engage in political dialogue and pronounce international solidarity. Regarded as anticitizens at home, the Black Panthers were heavily courted as vanguard political activists globally.
If African Americans constituted anticitizens, the white members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation were relatively privileged insiders who nevertheless embraced outsider status. Like other activists of the 1960s generation, the white delegates tended to be middle class, college educated, and young. Almost all of the travelers were in their midtwenties, while Cleaver and his co-leader Robert Scheer were in their midthirties. Although the white delegates had racial and class advantages, they identified with outcasts. They did so due to their ethnicity, politics, and/or gender.
In a poem about the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, Cleaver emphasized the significant presence of Jewish activists in their group. He writes:
In our Anti-War band
meant to be a crosscut
from each section of our land.
There were four Jewish women
And half a Jewish man.53
Robert Scheer, whose mother was a Jew from Russia and whose father was a gentile from Germany, was the “half a Jewish man.” The high proportion of Jewish activists within the delegation reflected a broader phenomenon within the civil rights and student movements of the 1950s and 1960s.54 Regardless of religious belief or practice, Jews of European ancestry in the United States were subjected to anti-Semitism and did not necessarily have the full privileges of “whiteness.” Scholar Jack Salzman identified “the lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta in 1915 . . . as a painful reminder to many Jews of both their own vulnerability and their need to struggle against racism.”55 For those who came of age in the aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust was fresh in the collective memories of their families and communities. Recognizing this history of social ostracism and genocide, Jewish Americans participated in significant numbers in protest movements for social justice. They supported and provided leadership for the NAACP. They constituted “two-thirds to three-quarters of the white volunteers who went south to ride busses through Alabama or organize Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964.”56 In fact, it was the outcry over the disappearance and deaths of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, “two young Jews from New York and a Black from Mississippi,” which attracted national attention to the 1964 Freedom Summer.57
The political beliefs of the white activists, Jewish and gentile, also positioned them as societal outsiders. They broadly constituted members of the New Left. The term conveyed their collective critique of and alienation from the existing American social order.58 These 1960s activists constituted the “new” Left as opposed to the “old” Left of the 1930s. The old Left, inspired by communist movements of the earlier period as well as classical Marxist theory, primarily focused on labor organizing. In contrast, the New Left emerged out of the era of civil rights, the counterculture, and Third World decolonization. They also critiqued capitalism and read Marxist-Leninist theory, but they focused more on issues related to race, empire, and culture. Interestingly, the white activists in the Anti-Imperialist Delegation tended to be “red diaper babies.” They were children of parents who belonged to the old Left.
Robert Scheer, the co-leader of the delegation, exemplified and played a leading role in defining the New Left. Born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents who worked in the garment industry, Scheer studied economics as an undergraduate and graduate student at a series of institutions of higher learning that eventually landed him at the University of California, Berkeley. In the San Francisco Bay Area, he worked for City Lights Bookstore, famous for its association with writers of the Beat generation, like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Fascinated by the Cuban Revolution, Scheer coauthored a book about the island in 1964. He traveled there regularly and cultivated relationships with political leaders like Fidel Castro. Scheer even asked the Cuban leader to write an introduction for the diaries of Bolivian revolutionary Che Guevera. Scheer arranged for the publication of the diaries, which quickly became a cult classic among American activists. These Cuban contacts became useful for Eldridge Cleaver, as Scheer assisted the Black Panther leader’s efforts to seek refuge there.
The two became collaborators through their mutual association with the New Left Catholic publication Ramparts.59 Founded in 1962, the magazine was an anomaly. It was a glossy yet alternative publication whose circulation reached almost three hundred thousand by 1970. Ramparts launched Eldridge Cleaver’s writing career, publishing his essays while he was still in prison. These initial pieces formed the genesis of the best-seller Soul on Ice. Cleaver eventually assumed the position of senior editor for the magazine, even as he became the minister of information for the Black Panthers and eventually fled the country.
Ramparts also fueled the antiwar movement in the United States. The magazine published articles that exposed CIA covert operations in Vietnam, the role that Michigan State University’s technical group played in supporting the war effort, and the widespread use and impact of napalm. From 1964 to 1969, Bob Scheer was at the center of these initiatives, first serving as the Vietnam correspondent, then a managing editor, and finally editor in chief for Ramparts.60
In many ways, Scheer was a kingmaker for Cleaver and other members of the BPP. Just as Scheer introduced Che Guevera to the American New Left, he arranged for Cleaver to work with Bobby Seale to write a biography of Huey Newton.61 Scheer also maintained close contact with Cleaver during his exile. While visiting the Black Panther leader in Algeria, Scheer brought news of political developments in the United States and also encouraged Cleaver to continue his writing and publishing. These activities generated a vital source of income for the Cleaver family and their growing entourage of asylum seekers and political dissidents.62 Scheer’s efforts entailed some risk. The FBI sought various ways to neutralize Eldridge Cleaver, even during his time abroad, and attempted to freeze his financial assets. So when Scheer returned from Algeria, he “was promptly subpoenaed to appear before the Federal Grand Jury meeting in San Francisco, and ordered to turn over all records of activities performed on behalf of Eldridge Cleaver’s legal defense.”63 Despite what Scheer described as a “general pattern of harassment,” he assured Ramparts readers that Cleaver would serve as the “International Editor of this magazine and reports by him will appear regularly.”
Given their partnership, it is not surprising that many of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation members had some connection to Bob Scheer and the New Left. Among the white delegates, a significant number had been politically active in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jan Austin was another editor at Ramparts. Andy Truskier was identified with the International Liberation School that was based in Berkeley as well as a member of the Peace and Freedom Party. Bob Scheer had run for the U.S. Senate in 1966 with the support of the party. Bob Browne, who had briefly run for a Senate seat in New Jersey, was aware of Scheer’s campaign in California and kept track of his effort. The Peace and Freedom Party also nominated Eldridge Cleaver as a presidential candidate in 1968. Another member of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, Regina Blumenfeld, described as a women’s liberation activist, was likewise from Berkeley.
Members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation not from the San Francisco Bay Area nevertheless had connections to the political movements that originated from that region. Another delegation member, Randy Rappaport, had lived with Gina Blumenfeld in what Rappaport characterizes as the “first political commune” in Berkeley. Inspired by the French Revolution, the members ironically called themselves “COPS . . . which stood for Committee on Public Safety.”64 Like Scheer, Rappaport was Jewish and came from Brooklyn. Her parents had been members of the Communist Party. Exposed to African American leftist cultural figures like Paul Robeson while she was growing up in a “very white . . . somewhat anti-Semitic” community, she eagerly engaged in civil rights activism in the Northeast, the South, and in California.65 At the time of the delegation, she had relocated to Boston, where she became involved with the women’s collective Bread and Roses. There, she befriended feminist activists, one of whom had traveled to Vietnam and others who eventually published the innovative women’s health manual, Our Bodies, Our Selves. Although Scheer and Cleaver did not know Rappaport, they knew the same people. At the Berkeley commune, Rappaport met SDS leader Tom Hayden and countercultural figure Stew Albert, a close friend of Cleaver’s who also visited him in Algeria.
Ann Froines, another Anti-Imperialist Delegation member, had political credentials similar to Rappaport’s and even closer connections to the Black Panthers. Froines grew up in Chicago and, like Rappaport, she was a member of a “red diaper family.”66 Although not Jewish, she lived in a neighborhood and attended school in “quite a heavily Jewish community.” She participated in the Warren Avenue Congregational Church, which was a seat of civil rights organizing that strived to create a multiracial and multiethnic community. She recalled that the “church had three pastors: a white, an African-American . . . and a Mexican . . . so there was services in Spanish.” The political consciousness of her family and the institutions that they chose to support prepared Froines to become an activist at Swarthmore College, a school founded by the pacifist Quakers. She recalled, “By the end of [my] college career I considered myself part of the New Left and we had an SDS chapter on our campus very early because one of the [authors of the] Port Huron Statement [the founding document for SDS], Carl Whitman, was a member of my class at Swarthmore.” She worked with others to improve the quality of education for African American students, who were experiencing de facto segregation due to racial and economic neighborhood stratification. Along with other members of her generation, she became aware of the “history of colonialism in Asia . . . [and] began to understand about American neo-colonialism.”
Although Froines had solid New Left credentials, her invitation to the Anti-Imperialist Delegation stemmed more directly from her involvement in defending the Black Panthers from political repression. In 1968, when antiwar activists protested the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Ann and her husband, John Froines, were spending the summer there with her family. Ann mainly busied herself with their young daughter, who was just six months old. John, also an activist, was slated to begin a tenure-track assistant professorship at the University of Oregon. That summer he “was organizing volunteer marshals in the city streets” to help stem the violent clashes between the police and protesters.67 He eventually was indicted as one of eight activists charged with conspiring to incite a riot. It was not clear why John became one of the Chicago 8. The others tended to be nationally recognized figures, like pacifist David Dellinger, SDS leaders Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, Yippie cult figures Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and Black Panther Bobby Seale. Eventually, John Froines and Lee Weiner, both less known and less flamboyant individuals, were acquitted. As Ann assisted in the defense of her husband and the other members of the Chicago 8, she became particularly appalled by the treatment of Bobby Seale. He was a last-minute replacement for Eldridge Cleaver, who was unable to travel outside of California due to concerns about violating his parole. In fact, Bobby Seale had been in Chicago for less than twenty-four hours during the Democratic convention. At the trial, the judge ordered that the Black Panther leader, the only African American among the charged conspirators, be bound and gagged for his vocal protests during court proceedings. Following the Chicago 8 trial and the subsequent murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by the city police in December 1969, Ann took a leadership role in the New Haven Black Panther Defense Committee. She believed that Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, and other members of the Panthers were facing politically motivated persecution. In response, Ann helped initiate a movement against what she described as “Racist and Political Oppression.”68
The final member of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, Janet Kranzberg, represented the Newsreel Alternative Media Collective, based in New York City. Founded in 1967, Newsreel was the East Coast film counterpart to Ramparts. The collective documented some of the most significant political protests, organizations, and individuals of that era, including the Chicago protests and the Black Panthers.69 Its filmmakers had traveled to Cuba and Vietnam. Kranzberg did not know Bob Scheer or Eldridge Cleaver, although she was closest to them in age. In fact, she received the invitation almost by default because of an outbreak of mononucleosis among other Newsreel filmmakers. She had met Tom Hayden in Chicago in 1968 and knew Gina Blumenfeld and Randy Rappaport from attending a women’s meeting at COPS. Like the other two women, Janet was Jewish. She recalled how the Holocaust had marked her consciousness. The awareness that she could have died, except for a fluke of history, fostered her belief in fairness, justice, and compassion.70 She traveled to the DPRK, expecting to create a documentary film about their experiences.
The “white” members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation were collectively connected to some of the most important New Left media sources, organizations, political movements, and individuals of the late 1960s and 1970s. Many of them also were “red diaper babies,” with personal and intellectual connections to the old Left. In addition, the ethnic and gender composition of the delegation reflected the broader participation and leadership of both Jewish and female activists in the social movements of this era.
The remaining members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, Alex Hing and Pat Sumi, were just as excited as the others, perhaps even more so, by the opportunity to travel to socialist Asia with Eldridge Cleaver. Their presence on the tour symbolized the significant influence of black liberation struggles and sixties radicalism more generally on Americans of Asian ancestry during the 1960s and 1970s. While there was a history of activism within Asian American communities as well, both Sumi and Hing were effectively cut off from this past due to the combined legacies of Japanese American internment during World War II and the subsequent suppression of Chinese American leftists during the Cold War. Unlike the white travelers, many of whom had direct and personal connections to the old Left, Asian American radicals lacked political role models within their own community. Consequently, Sumi and Hing, like others who helped to form the Asian American movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, credited external political developments for transforming their political consciousness. Yet the ways in which Sumi and Hing were invited to join the delegation indicated their relatively marginal status within American activist circles.
During World War II and the 1950s, Chinese and Japanese Americans respectively obtained unprecedented legal rights in the United States. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they had been designated “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” subjected to racial segregation, and prevented from immigrating to the United States, owning land in many states, and marrying interracially. The World War II alliance with China and the Cold War alliance with Japan led to the removal of these legal restrictions and eventually a new image of Chinese and Japanese Americans as “model minorities.”71 These changes in legal status and cultural representation did not necessarily redress the historical and continued significance of racial discrimination.
Alex Hing was a far cry from the model minority image. Born in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1946, Hing grew up in a borderline middle-class family. His father worked as a magician in a nightclub that catered predominantly to tourists, and his mother worked in a department store and also occasionally helped her husband with his act. Although Chinatown was and is widely regarded as a tourist destination, the community throughout its history could more accurately be characterized as a segregated urban ghetto.72 It boasted the second-highest population density in the country, the highest tuberculosis rate, and widespread substandard housing. Like Cleaver, Hing became involved with youth gangs and committed a number of crimes that eventually landed him in detention. Seeking to find direction in his life, Hing enrolled in San Francisco City College and sought to avoid his former friends. While in school, Hing developed his political consciousness by listening to Bob Dylan, reading revolutionary literature, and participating in civil rights and antiwar activities sponsored by students “who were red diaper babies.”73 He even registered voters to support Eldridge Cleaver’s presidential campaign as a candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968.74
Hing recalled being particularly impressed by the Panthers. He thought “the Black Panther Party was really, really, really cool. I thought that they were really hip. These were a bunch of gangsters, just like us. . . . The people I grew up with—we all hated cops and they were having pitch[ed] battles with the cops and they were articulating everything that we felt. . . . They were speaking for us. So even though my involvement was through the antiwar movement, my heart was with the Black Panthers.”75 Hing’s admiration for the political gangster persona of the Panthers resonates with the analysis of American Studies scholar Daryl Maeda. He suggests that Asian American political and cultural activists during the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly Asian American men, mimicked the performance of black masculinity in order to formulate their own identities as racialized and resistant subjects.76
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Hing decided to participate in a journey that took him from Oakland, California, to Washington, DC. Described as a “last chance for nonviolence,” the trip was part of the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement that King called for before his death to bring attention to poverty in American society. Hing was initially hesitant to join the effort, explaining, “I’m not a Martin guy, I’m a Malcolm guy.” Since the Panthers also endorsed the campaign, Hing decided to get on the bus. During the summer of 1968, he traveled across the country learning about various political struggles. In New Mexico, Hing was exposed to Chicano struggles to regain land initially granted by the Spanish and lost as a result of Anglo conquest. In the South, they “went . . . from church to church rallying.” The Ku Klux Klan attempted to stop their journey, placing bombs on their buses while they were at a gathering in Louisville, Kentucky. On the journey, Hing met Black Panthers, Chicano or Mexican American youth, and white students affiliated with the Communist Party, USA. He was familiar with these groups, having been exposed to their struggles and working with them on various causes. However, as a Chinese American, he was unfamiliar to other activists. When they arrived in Washington, DC, Hing recalled, “Everyone thought I was an Indian.”77
After that summer, Hing returned to his community to organize. The group that he helped to form, the Red Guard Party, USA was heavily influenced by the BPP. Inspired by the Black Panthers’ ten-point program, the Red Guards adopted a similar agenda and studied Mao’s Little Red Book. Ironically, the Chinese American youth who formed the organization gained their first exposure to the Chinese leader through the Panthers. Bobby Seale invited them to participate in weekly study groups at Eldridge Cleaver’s house, where they read and debated Mao’s writings. David Hilliard, the chief of staff for the BPP who assumed leadership of the organization during the absence of Newton, Seale, and Cleaver, spoke at the founding rally of the Red Guard. The Panthers even encouraged the Chinatown group to adopt the name Red Guard to encourage identification with the youth movement and Cultural Revolution in China. Alex Hing, as the minister of information for the Red Guard Party, USA represented the Chinese American counterpart to Eldridge Cleaver.78
The disconnect between Hing as an American of Chinese descent from Mao’s China was indicative of broader political legacies within the Chinese American community. Historically there had been an active and vocal Left within Chinese communities in the United States, especially during the late 1920s and 1930s.79 During that time, Chinese Americans were inspired by the resilience of the Chinese Communist Party in fighting Japanese imperialism as well as the vibrancy of the Communist Party, USA. However, with the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, described in the United States as the “fall” of China, and the ensuing McCarthyist witch hunts in the 1950s, the Chinese American Left was driven underground or deported. The San Francisco Chinatown that Hing grew up in was politically dominated by the Kuomingtang (KMT) or Chinese Nationalist Party. The KMT supported the Republic of China, which claimed to represent China although it was based only on the island of Taiwan. As an expression of their opposition to Mao’s China, the nationalists cooperated wholeheartedly with FBI efforts to intimidate and silence leftist sympathizers. The Little Red Book, like other things associated with Communist China, was banned from sale in Chinatown stores.
Even though Hing gained his first exposure to Mao’s words through the Black Panthers and not through people of his own ancestry, he had to “fight” his way into the Cleaver delegation. In contrast, Hing unexpectedly received support from the old Chinatown Left. When Hing heard about the trip to North Korea through the “movement grapevine,” he persuaded David Hilliard to include a member of the Red Guards in the delegation. Until then, the group consisted almost entirely of white activists. He recalled arguing, “We should be in on this. We were really close to the Panthers. How dare they organize a trip of U.S. people to North Korea and not invite us?” Hing’s statement indicates that even though he was based in a Chinese American organization, he was part of a broader movement that emerged in the late 1960s that advocated a pan-Asian consciousness, a sense of connection between people of Asian ancestry in the United States as well as with leftist Asian nations internationally. Hing finally received the invitation to join the delegation rather late in the process, when some travelers were already in Paris. Furthermore, he was responsible for raising funds for the trip. Hing recalled pondering, “Which bank are we going to rob now?” However, “the word got out” in the Chinese American community about his invitation, and “five thousand dollars’ cash [was] delivered to me. . . . It turns out it came from the old Left in Chinatown that I had not a clue existed. . . . They were convinced that I would end up in China, too. So that I would be one of the first Chinese Americans to go to revolutionary China.”80
The old Chinatown Left was not alone in their enthusiasm for the socialist Chinese government. The newsletter published by the Red Guard Party, USA had featured Mao’s portrait as well as information about the PRC. They also sought to challenge the KMT stranglehold on political expression by openly flying Red China’s flag and broadcasting their support for Mao at community rallies.81 Consequently, even though the Anti-Imperialist Delegation initially intended to travel only to North Korea, Hing believed that he would find a way to get to Red China. Its status as a powerful and respected nation among U.S. activist circles helped to form Hing’s identity. The small size of the Asian population in the United States, constituting approximately one million people, as well as its pan-ethnic demographic, held implications for the political aspirations of Asian Americans.82 In contrast to African Americans, Chicano/as, and even American Indians, Asian Americans had difficulty viewing themselves as a separate nation with claims to territorial sovereignty on U.S. soil. While Asian Americans could forge a political identity as a racialized group, it was more difficult to argue that they constituted a “nation,” similar to a Black Nation with rights to the territory of the American South or the Chicano Nation with its connection to the American Southwest.83 Chinese American activists could at least claim Mao and the PRC as international beacons for radical socialism as well as nationalist sources of inspiration.
Although Pat Sumi’s upbringing and views on socialist Asia differed from Alex Hing’s, the black liberation struggle also played a central role in shaping her political consciousness and activism. Unlike Hing, Sumi grew up as a member of a relatively privileged Japanese American upper-middle-class family in the Los Angeles area. Her grandparents emigrated from Japan and achieved financial success by owning and operating a paper factory. Like other Japanese immigrants, they utilized their networks within the ethnic economy to establish a niche in the United States. Sumi’s grandparents built their fortune by catering to the large numbers of Japanese Americans in agriculture and produce marketing. They succeeded so well that they were able to persuade Pat’s father to marry into their family and to adopt the Sumi name after marrying their only daughter.84 Despite their financial success, the U.S. government interned the Sumi family, along with other Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, during World War II. Due to their Japanese ancestry, they were regarded as enemies of the state. Pat Sumi was born in 1944, when her family was on furlough from camp and residing in Colorado.85 With the support of their white neighbors and friends, the Sumis were able to maintain some of their financial assets and resume their previous status, something that was relatively rare among Japanese American internees. Even though Pat’s father eventually abandoned his wife and two daughters, the wealth of the Sumi family offered Pat the opportunity to grow up in a privileged and protected environment.
In contrast to Hing, Sumi lived the role of the “model minority.” She grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of Silverlake, where she excelled in predominantly white schools and was part of the “smart” crowd. Like Elaine Brown, Pat Sumi also learned and excelled in playing classical music, the violin rather than the piano. Throughout junior and senior high school, she participated in student government, journalism, and other activities that groomed her for civic leadership.86 Sumi, in her senior high school photograph, looks like an Asian version of Jackie Kennedy. She sports a short but elegantly coiffed haircut and a pearl necklace.87
Like Hing, Sumi became increasingly radical due to the influence of the black liberation movement and the growing international attention regarding race and global inequalities. She first realized her lack of understanding about race relations in the United States when she traveled to Japan to visit relatives in 1963. When asked about the civil rights movement in the American South, she realized, “[I] could not explain my own country to someone who was asking me a halfway decent intelligent question.”88 As an extension of her liberal commitment to civic leadership, Sumi eventually traveled to Africa as part of Operation Crossroads, a program that promoted educational and cultural exchange similar to the Peace Corps. She also volunteered for civil rights work in the American South. She recalled, “This was in ’66 and ’67. Both summers I went and met people in CORE and SNCC, met people like Stokely Carmichael who had just begun using the slogan ‘black power.’ I attended the first Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) able to be held in the south because of the desegregation of public facilities.”89
When Sumi returned to the West Coast, she became involved with the antiwar movement, which to her was also about issues of race. Not only were the “vast majority of the front line infantry . . . black and brown,” but American engagement in the war also promoted “a hatred of the Vietnamese.”90 Sumi joined the Movement for a Democratic Military and focused her energies on organizing active-duty Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton in southern California.91 She hosted “coffeehouses” where soldiers could hear speakers like Black Panther Angela Davis and actress Jane Fonda discuss their opposition to the Vietnam War. This was dangerous work, as Sumi and her co-organizers faced government surveillance, drive-by shootings, and police raids for their antiwar activities among Marines.92 Pat Sumi, the model minority, had evolved in her political engagement to the point that she was directly challenging the state and encouraging soldiers to question their citizenship responsibilities to the nation. By then, Sumi was participating in study groups and becoming increasingly critical of capitalism. For her, the racial stratification of American society resulted from the “political economy that helped to create that division and continues that division and on whose survival that division must remain.”93
Unlike Hing, who was focusing his activism on Chinese Americans, Sumi tended to work outside of her own ethnic, racial, and even gender group at this point in her political career. For a period of time, she lived in a “pacifist commune” that was “really upper, middle class, hippie. . . . She kept house for about eight men, cooked, did laundry for” them.94 Even though Sumi rejected the role of being a “Japanese housewife,” she recognized, “that was what I was basically into. I didn’t want to. I felt bad, but I couldn’t figure out what else to do about it, so I did it anyway.”95 Sumi found one avenue to critique male chauvinism through the GI antiwar movement. Scholar Heather Marie Stur points out that these activists emphasized “gender liberation—the liberation not only of women but of men as well.”96 They raised questions about the cultural expectations of “conventional masculinity” that led American men to regard the “military as a bastion of masculinity and male bonding.”97
Sumi’s initial disconnect from an understanding of her own racial and gender oppression stemmed partly from her class background but also from a conscious political amnesia within the Japanese American community.98 The World War II internment of Japanese Americans was premised on the belief that this group constituted the racial antithesis of American citizens. While Sumi grew up with stories about the camps, she accepted the internment “as part of what happened during World War II, without necessarily questioning” why it occurred.99 Like many other Japanese Americans during the postinternment era, which also coincided with the McCarthyist era, Pat’s family resorted to individual strategies to regain their foothold in American society.
By the late 1960s, some Japanese Americans in Southern California had begun to reject these nonconfrontational approaches. The publication of the newspaper Gidra signaled the emergence of a “yellow power” movement, a phrase that underscored the significance of black power for Asian Americans.100 While Sumi had participated in coalition efforts on behalf of Third World students in the San Francisco Bay Area, she did not appear to be particularly identified with the emerging Asian American movement in Southern California.101 The BPP also did not view her as a representative of Asian Americans but invited her due to her antiwar work with the military. Just prior to the scheduled departure of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, she traveled with a group of GIs opposed to the war to the BPP headquarters in Berkeley. She met chief of staff David Hilliard, who extended an invitation to her to join the delegation.102 Sumi’s “Asianness” was not completely absent from the consideration to include her though. She believed that her presence resulted from tokenism: the organizers “realized that this was a delegation to Asia, and there were no Asians in the group.”103
Not only did Sumi not necessarily identify with the Asian American category, she did not approach socialist Asia with the sense of radical nationalism that inspired Alex Hing. As a person of Japanese ancestry, Sumi was inadvertently linked to that nation’s colonial legacy. As she stated following her return from the delegation, “Being Japanese is very confusing, because my Mama was in a camp for 2 years. . . . At the same time, I know the Japanese were slaughtering millions of innocent people in Asia. So I couldn’t identify with the American pigs, when they were putting my people into camps, but I couldn’t identify with the Japanese pigs either.”104 The trip to socialist Asia—particularly to Korea, a former colony of Japan—consequently raised rather difficult issues for Sumi regarding her ethnic and national identity. Her dilemma was mirrored in the contents of the Gidra newsletter, a publication produced by a predominantly Japanese American staff. The periodical drew parallels between the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II and the massive destruction wrought on Vietnam by the American military.105 At the same time, the newsletter also highlighted Japan’s roles as a colonial aggressor and as a Cold War ally of the United States. For Japanese Americans like Sumi, their desire for international leftist solidarity necessitated a critique of cultural nationalism and Japanese militarism.
Sumi and Hing differed in how their class, ethnicity, and gender shaped their political transformations. Hing, who identified with working-class Chinese Americans, was drawn to the militant masculine personas of the Black Panthers. Sumi, in contrast, came from a more privileged middle-class background and struggled with conventional expectations of Asian femininity and American militarized masculinity. While Hing embraced Chinese socialist nationalism as well as pan-Asian solidarity, Sumi critiqued Japanese imperialism and had not yet identified comfortably with the emerging Asian American movement. Nevertheless, as American activists of Asian descent, Sumi and Hing recognized their commonality and their collective difference from the white as well as African American activists on the Anti-Imperialist Delegation.
The disparity between the importance of black activism and the relative marginalization of Asian Americans within activist circles was mirrored by the differential treatment that these two groups received from white American activists and socialist Asian nations. The dominant understanding of racial oppression in the United States was based on the experiences of African Americans. In contrast, Asian Americans were almost completely invisible on the political radar. In addition, even though both the BPP and Asian American movement publications featured articles on socialist Asian nations, only the BPP newspaper contained greetings, letters, and telegrams from leaders likes Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, and Kim Il Sung.106 These socialist Asian representatives regarded the black movement in the United States as a vanguard revolutionary force. They courted leaders like Eldridge Cleaver and organizations like the BPP. They also established contacts with the white New Left and monitored the broader antiwar movement. In contrast, relatively little attention was paid to Asian Americans, despite their ancestral connections to Asia and their growing admiration for socialist Asia. Nevertheless, both Alex Hing and Pat Sumi regarded their travels to North Korea, North Vietnam, and Red China as profoundly moving and transformative experiences. They, along with other members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, were eager to journey halfway around the world to witness the accomplishments of socialist Asia.