Straight outta Oakland
Shining a light on the shadowy figure who armed the Black Panthers.
By Ed M. Koziarski
Apr 17, 2010
Training recruits on an Oakland tennis court, the Black Panther
Party's Japanese-American field marshal Richard Aoki would call out
the cadence: "A .38 will set it straight. A .45 will keep you alive.
A .357 will send them to heaven."
Panthers cofounder Huey Newton "was appalled," Aoki recalled 40 years
later in Ben Wang and Mike Cheng's documentary Aoki, which has its
Chicago premiere April 8 in the 15th Annual Asian American Showcase
at the Gene Siskel Film Center. "But he understood all this wouldn't
come about peacefully."
Aoki was born in 1938 in mostly African-American West Oakland. After
Pearl Harbor, like 110,000 other Japanese-Americans, Aoki's family
were sent to an internment camp. As a teenager, Aoki joined the black
and Asian street gang the Saints. He witnessed the daily brutality
Oakland police committed against minorities. "I could easily see the
similarities between the concentration-camp experience and the
conditions in the West Oakland ghetto," Aoki says in the film.
He spent eight years in the Army and was a drill instructor when he
turned down a reenlistment bonus as Vietnam was heating up, calling
it "blood money." At Merritt College in Oakland, he befriended Newton
and fellow vet Bobby Seale, joining in pool-hall brawls and boozy rap
sessions. When they invited him to join the Black Panthers in 1966,
Aoki asked them "'besides being crazy, are you color-blind?' Huey
said 'the struggle for freedom, justice and equality transcends
racial and ethnic boundaries.'" Aoki not only joined, he used his
honorable-discharge card to obtain the Panthers' first rifles and
handguns from dealers, and oversaw their combat training.
Twenty-eight Panthers died in police raids on Panther offices in 1969
(including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago). Aoki avoided the
limelight. "If 'the Man' knew I was field marshal, they would have
killed me," he says in the film. Building alliances across ethnic
lines, he helped lead the Third World Liberation Front strike that
established UC Berkeley's pioneering ethnic-studies program.
As a city-college administrator and counselor, Aoki worked quietly
for decades to support poor and minority students. He finally went
public about his revolutionary past after Newton's 1989 murder by an
Oakland drug dealer.
Cheng and Wang (whose Japanese-American aunts and uncles had been
interned during WWII), were Asian-American studies majors at UC Davis
in 2002 when they interviewed Aoki for the student newspaper Third
World Forum. "We were trying to build a broader coalition among
students of color," Wang says. "Meeting Richard made it much more
real and motivated us to get more involved."
"He said none of the documentaries about the Panthers to date got it
quite right," Cheng recalls. "We said 'why don't you let us do a doc
about you?'" Aoki took the students under his wing, bringing them to
antiwar rallies and introducing them to Bay Area activist groups.
After graduating in 2004, with no film experience, Cheng and Wang
began five years of filming Aoki.
Cheng got an apartment in Aoki's Berkeley four flat. Through their
shared wall, he heard Aoki fall and break his leg after a stroke in
'05 and brought him to the hospital. After driving Aoki to speaking
appearances, Cheng says, "he'd be as pale as a sheet." In the weeks
before his death last year, while undergoing dialysis, Aoki kept
asking about protests over Bay Area transit police's fatal shooting
of an unarmed suspect in custody. "He was always engaged," Cheng
says. "When it came down to taking care of himself or doing political
work, he'd choose the political work."
Aoki screens April 8 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
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AOKI documentary film Monday on a Japanese American founding member
of the Black Panther Party
March 29, 2010
By: Frances Kai-Hwa Wang
fkwang888@gmail.com
It's so sad to see the Ann Arbor Film Festival wind up for another
year, but before we have a chance to even lose momentum, here comes a
film straight from the San Francisco International Asian American
Film Festival that is not to be missedAOKI.
From the University of Michigan Asian/Pacific Islander American
Heritage Month Committee, in collaboration with the Asian Pacific
American Law Student Association (APALSA), comes a screening of one
of this year's most talked-about Asian American documentaries, plus a
discussion with filmmaker Ben Wang:
"Monday, March 29 at the 236 Hutchins Hall from 7 to 9 p.m. AOKI is
a documentary film chronicling the life of Richard Aoki, a
third-generation Japanese American who became one of the founding
members of the Black Panther Party. The film explores previously
unknown facts about the formation of the Black Panther Party and
highlights how Richard's leadership made a significant impact on
individuals and groups in the contemporary Asian American Movement.
AOKI demonstrates the incredible dedication to justice that one man's
life has had and how the lessons of solidarity, commitment and
discipline can carry on from one generation to the next."
You have to see the trailer to get a feel for the film and the times.
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