[ Two Asian American men’s experiences as volunteers with the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the American
civil rights movement.] [[link removed]]

“YOU’RE NOT COLORED”: THE STORY OF TWO CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS
OF JAPANESE DESCENT  
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Miriam Axel-Lute and Keli A. Tianga
November 28, 2017
Shelterforce
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_ Two Asian American men’s experiences as volunteers with the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the American
civil rights movement. _

SNCC newsletter, "SNCC Newsletter turns toward black nationalism:
1967" by Washington Area Spark is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

 

Shelterforce_ staff met Ed Nakawatase and Tamio Wakayama when the two
were the guests of honor at an event held during National CAPACD’s
annual conference in 2015. One theme at the conference that year was
the Asian American Pacific Islander community’s support of the
burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement, and how remaining unwavering
in that support would ultimately make the social justice movement for
all marginalized communities stronger. We heard about the two men’s
experiences as volunteers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) during the American civil rights movement, and the
extraordinariness of their witness to the history happening at the
time compelled us to pursue a conversation. Their experiences
highlight the pervasiveness of Western xenophobia and racism, and how
its underlying threat of violence affected two communities of color
differently._ 

KELI TIANGA: LOOKING BACK TO YOUR CHILDHOODS, WERE THERE EXPERIENCES
YOU CAN CONNECT TO YOUR DECISIONS TO LEAVE HOME, AND ULTIMATELY BECOME
MEMBERS OF SNCC?

TAMIO WAKAYAMA: I’m a _Nikkei_, a Japanese-Canadian, born to
parents who had emigrated from Japan in [the] 1930s. I was born in
1941, about nine months before the outbreak of the Pacific War with
the bombing of Pearl Harbor. My family had bought property in the
Fraser Valley, now the outskirts of Vancouver. My father, who had come
first, had brought over all the family, a set of grandparents and
aunts and uncles, and they were well on their way toward a good life
when the bombs went off and the shit hit the fan.

We were swept up in the roundup of some 22,000 Japanese-Canadians
living on the coast. We were herded into cattle stalls, and stuck for
a month or two before [the Canadian government] hastily erected camps
in the interior of British Columbia.

Americans are very surprised when they learn that Canada undertook the
same draconian measures as America [against] its Japanese-American
citizens. In a lot of cases, the Canadian experience was much worse in
that we were [not] allowed to return to our homes until 1949. We
weren’t allowed to vote until then, nor were we allowed to
participate as combat soldiers in the second World War, unlike the
Japanese-Americans and their legendary 442nd Combat Unit, the most
highly decorated unit in American history.

After the war, we were given two choices—either relocate [East] of
the Rockies or accept what they called “repatriation” to Japan.
They wanted to solve the “yellow peril” problem once and for all.
So they said, “If you want to keep your family together, you should
sign up for repatriation to Japan,” and some 7,000
Japanese-Canadians suffered exile to Japan before a concerted effort
by church groups and civil libertarian groups in Canada managed to
force Parliament to rescind those orders.

My family thankfully decided that they’d remain in the country, and
so we settled in the small farming community of Chatham, Ontario.
Growing up in Chatham was an experience that was in many ways
devastating because we [were] isolated and still bore the brand of
“enemy alien,” the official designation by the Canadian
government.

Media of the day portrayed us as this inhuman, treacherous, physically
repulsive force, so that was [the] self-image I had to combat. There
[were] times when you had to fight your way to and from school. In my
final year of university, I fell in love, [but she] wanted nothing to
do with it, and this totally devastated me. So, in a desperate leap, I
jumped into my Volkswagen that I borrowed $800 from my mother to buy,
went South, and miraculously became part of one of the most luminous
and transformative moments in American life.

ED NAKAWATASE: My parents met in the camps in Poston, Arizona. My
father came to the United States in 1929.

My grandfather was a sort of itinerant farmer, based in the Imperial
Valley in California. My grandfather was picked up by the FBI [after]
the bombing of Pearl Harbor, within a day or two. The agents came to
the field where he was working and told him that he needed to pack a
suitcase, which my grandmother did. There were no other details. He
was then incarcerated in Fort Lincoln in North Dakota, and there was
no contact with him at all until later in 1942 after my family was
interned in Poston, Arizona.

My parents married and had me in the camp. My family then moved from
Poston before the camps were closed and before the war ended, to
Wilson, Arkansas, which has been described as both a company town and
a plantation. It’s in the Delta area of Arkansas, in Mississippi
County. My surmise is that they were offered jobs that [were] akin to
sharecropping. Around late 1946, [my] family moved to Seabrook, New
Jersey [which] was assiduously getting Japanese-Americans to work in
Seabrook Farms, a frozen food plant. There were, at its peak, about
2,500 people of Japanese descent in Seabrook [which] I think made it
one of the most densely-populated concentrations of Japanese-Americans
in the United States. Seabrook is where I grew up.

MIRIAM AXEL-LUTE: DID EITHER OF YOUR FAMILIES TALK ABOUT
INCARCERATION? DID YOU HEAR FROM ADULTS IN YOUR COMMUNITY ABOUT WHAT
HAPPENED AND THE POLITICS BEHIND IT, AS WELL AS THE EXPERIENCE?

NAKAWATASE: What was described [was] the condition and the types of
places they lived. There was no illusion about what it was, but there
was no extended outrage or anger. It was that we endured. ‘”We
went through this, it’s over, and we’re here now,” was the way
it was put. There was no extended treatise on American racism, or
injustice. The perspective and the resulting anger I think [has] built
over time, but in the ’50s and ’60s, there was little discussion
about it at all.

My parents and all the other parents, they’d lived through the
dislocation of the war and the internment camps and the relocation,
and the Depression before that. I think there was a very strong push
to be as normal as possible. That’s the way I [and] everybody else I
knew was raised. You smooth down the edges, you didn’t make waves.

AXEL-LUTE: ED, WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO HEAD SOUTH?

NAKAWATASE: Growing up, I had some consciousness about what was going
on in the South, but it was fairly abstract. I didn’t quite make the
connection between [that and] the fact that my family and all the
other families that I knew had been incarcerated, essentially, because
of their race. I read all about it—the Montgomery bus boycott, the
murder of Emmett Till, efforts to desegregate schools in the South,
and then a sit-in movement, and then the Freedom Ride. There was this
kind of visceral reaction to it.

By the time I was in the midst of my first year in college, [in]
’62, ’63, I really began to feel that this was something I wanted
to be a part of. I [had] just turned 20 when I went South. It was that
simple and that crazy. I remember watching on television an interview
with Jim Forman, and he really raised the ante. He [was] basically
saying that if need be, [he’d be] killed. It made me think, “Wow,
these guys are something.”

So, I showed up on campus at Rutgers and just said, “I’m
leaving,” and I left, and that was it. I hopped a bus from
Bridgeton, New Jersey, rode for about 24 hours [and] wound up in
Atlanta—completely unconnected with anybody who worked there, no
resume, no clear qualifications for anything. I basically went to the
[SNCC] office and spoke about working for the organization.

There were two crazy elements here. One was me. But, the other crazy
thing is they basically said, “OK.” I mean, think about it: There
was no phone contact. I had not written a thing. There was no sense
that I was qualified to do anything. I just had my hopes and dreams,
and I showed up and had a nice conversation with Worth Long and Ruby
Doris Robinson. A sensible response on their part would have been,
“Kid, get the hell out of here,” but they didn’t do that. Within
about a month or so, I was a regular person in the office. And the
rest for me is history.

WAKAYAMA: I remember one day I turned on the TV, and there was this
sit-in demonstration in [and] a group of seven or eight Black
students, very serious, very somber, dressed in shirt and tie, and
they walked into this forbidden lunch counter and sat down. They were
very calm, and they remained calm even when Cokes and raw eggs were
splattered over their heads, and when they were thrown to the ground,
they just went into their defensive posture. And when the violence
abated, they just calmly stood up and retook their seats. This totally
blew me away.

At the end of that summer came the March on Washington. The one speech
that really stuck with me was the young leader of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis. I could identify with
him, because here was this kid who was a student just like me, about
my age. He didn’t have the smooth diction and the great, mellifluous
speech of King and others, but there was an incredible sense of
passion and reality to him. That stuck in my head.

At the end of the summer, I said to my mother, “I’m just going to
take a short vacation to the South before returning and finishing my
final year of university.” And I didn’t see her for about a year
or two. I knew no one, I just had this kind of inchoate idea that
perhaps within this Black struggle for freedom that I could somehow
find the matrix of my own liberation. So I drove south.

I landed in Nashville, Tennessee, and the car radio was interrupted by
this flash news bulletin [that] in Birmingham, Alabama, a bomb had
exploded in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church, and four
young girls were known to have died.

So I turned around and headed for Birmingham. As I drove, this Jeep
came careening around the corner. It was filled with grim-looking
soldiers in total battle dress with helmets. The Jeep looked like a
steel picket fence with the profusion of bayonets. Mine was about the
only vehicle on the street [and] there was nobody on the sidewalks.
All the stores and theaters were locked up.

I found one place that was open, and pulled in behind this pickup
truck emblazoned with Dixie flags and banners and bumper stickers
saying, ‘Keep America White.’ I took a seat, and there were about
four or five Black men sitting around, and they looked at me. I had my
pack of Red Canadian DuMauriers on the counter, and this young Black
kid was staring at them. I said, “Oh, they’re Canadian cigarettes.
They’re really different from yours, so here, try one, see if you
like it.” That broke the ice, and then the owner came over, and he
asked me what I was doing. I said I was interested in what was
happening with the civil rights movement. And so, [for] the next half
hour, he told me what it was like to be Black in the South, and it was
this horrendous, terrifying story where a Black man could wake up in
the morning and not know whether he would just have to go through the
daily humiliations of being Black, or whether he would have to face
the ultimate terror and horror of being lynched.

At the end, he said, “Well, we thank you for coming down here, but I
think you should get back in your little car and turn around and go
back home. And when you get there, you tell all your people there that
what they’ve been seeing on the TV and on the radio and on the
newspapers, that all the beatings and all the jailing, and them dogs
and them fire hoses, it’s all very real, and it is happening every
day. But that truck you parked behind belongs to the Klan, they’re
keeping an eye on us since we’re about the only place open to this
night. And when you leave, they might be wondering, well, who’s that
boy hanging out with all them ni**, and they might stop you on the way
out, and God knows what could happen.”

During that conversation, I gleaned that all the civil rights people
flooding into the city would be meeting at the AG Gaston Motel. So the
next morning I went over there. AG Gaston was one of the few Black
millionaires in the South at this point, and his motel was kind of the
de facto headquarters of the movement, along with a lot of the
churches.

So, I walked into the lobby, and it was filled with movement people,
most of them Black, and a lot of them were the dungaree-clad workers,
young people [with] SNCC. I spotted John Lewis, and went over and
said, “Mr. Lewis, I was so impressed with your speech.” We talked
for a long while. This guy was tremendously giving and [had] this real
gentle quality to him that I immediately glommed onto. He introduced
me to Julian Bond and some of the other people, and said, “You might
want to come over and visit us at SNCC headquarters in Atlanta.”

At that point, Annie Pearl Avery, who was this young civil rights
worker, said, “You should just sleep here,” so, I hung out for the
remainder of my stay in Birmingham, and Annie Pearl and I [went] to
the memorial service for three of the children that were killed in the
bombing. The fourth child was going to have a private ceremony just
with her family.

I was driving and [got] lost. And I said, “Annie Pearl where the
hell are we?” We were in this ritzy section of Birmingham. And I
looked over and Annie Pearl had crunched under the dash of the car. I
said, “Annie Pearl, what the hell are you doing down there?” She
says, “We in whitey territory now, and [if] they catch my Black ass
in here with you, we’re going to be in a whole lot of trouble, so
get us out of here.” I floored it, and we got to the church.

After [the service], I said, “I’m going to Atlanta to visit SNCC
headquarters, and I’d gladly offer rides to anybody who wants to
go.” So, driving to Atlanta, I had James Forman, the executive
secretary of SNCC; Julian Bond, the communications director; and
[photographer] Danny Lyon.

So, [we arrived] in Atlanta in the late evening, and Forman said,
“You could stay in the Freedom House, but would you mind cleaning up
and emptying out the garbage?” I said sure, and after, I said,
“Could I drive you home?” So, I drove him to his home. Forman was
this very imposing figure, a big man who had an arsenal of sneers and
snorts and sighs that could be totally intimidating. He looked over at
me and [asked], “You one of them humanitarians?” I said, “No,
I’m a _Sokuseki _Buddhist,” which immediately confounded him.
There was a silence for the rest of the way. And I just made that up
[Note: _sokuseki_ means “instant” in Japanese].

So, that’s how I became part of SNCC.

TIANGA: DID EITHER OF YOU WITNESS OR EXPERIENCE VIOLENCE?

NAKAWATASE: I wound up in jail over Christmas in 1963 with a group of
SNCC [members]. It was a mixed group of women, both Black and white,
and of men, all Black except me, and one of them was John Lewis. We
had gone to a Huddle House, which was a greasy spoon in the Atlanta
area, and got picked up, arrested, and jailed for criminal trespass. I
was being arraigned, I was telling the [officers] I want to go in with
those guys, meaning [the] Black SNCC people, as opposed to being in
some jail by myself. And [there] was just incredible bewilderment. The
guy looks at me, and says—I’m paraphrasing—“You’re not
colored,” meaning I’m not Black, “so, [you’re] white.” So he
put me in the white city jail for a couple days, and then three days
in the county jail.

I had the edifying experience of being with a bunch of drunks in the
city jail [the] first two nights. Then there was another guy from
SNCC, a white guy named Sam Shirah, got picked up and he and I were in
county jail together. We were in there with some wife beaters and guys
who bounced checks, and there was a whole range of felonies there.
Once they found out that we were in there for criminal trespass, I
think they figured what that was, [and] it got a little cool there. If
we’d stayed in there for just another day, I suspect we would have
gotten beaten up.

There was a July 4th event at the fairgrounds outside of Atlanta, a
huge gathering of segregationists—their featured speakers were
George Wallace and Lester Maddox. I don’t exactly know what
possessed me, but I went there with two or three other SNCC people and
tried to be as invisible as possible to check out these guys ranting
about the virtues of segregation and the ominous horrors that were
going to be laid upon them by the federal government and these
race-mixers. And then, a couple of my SNCC colleagues were assaulted.
The guys picked up folding chairs and ran after them, and it was mean
and nasty.

WAKAYAMA: Prior to the big Freedom Summer ’64 program in which we
were going to get 1,000 students from the north and other parts [to]
come down and man projects in Mississippi, there was this orientation
program for the staff in Tougaloo College, just outside of Jackson. On
Sunday, one of the last speakers was Reverend Ed King, a white
Mississippian and a pastor and lecturer [at] Tougaloo. He was a
veteran of the civil rights movement, and so was considered a traitor
to his race [and] had risen to the top of the hit list [of] the Ku
Klux Klan.

Rev. King was telling us about one night he was driving out of the
campus, [which] back then was in a remote farm area outside of
Jackson, [and] this pickup truck slammed in front of him, and another
one came behind, and he was blocked off. He realize[s] it’s the
Klan, and was just resigning himself to meeting his death.

[Rev. King] was [driving] a couple professors from the University of
Delhi who were guests of Tougaloo back to their hotel in Jackson. This
voice popped up and said, “Pardon me, but I am a guest lecturer and
a guest of your state department. If any harm is done to me or to my
colleagues, my government will immediately launch a[n] official
protest with your government, and they will be forced to hunt you down
and to bring you to justice.” They said, “Oh, shut your mouth,
rag-head.” And then, finally, one voice said, “Wait a minute now,
that man may have something.” So, that voice of reason, or
cowardice, depending on your point of view, won out, and Rev. King and
his party were allowed to continue on to Jackson.

My job as a photographer was to stay clear, get the images, and come
back with camera and me intact. I roamed around Mississippi for two,
three months after the Freedom Summer ended, and it was one of my most
creative times in the South. The violence there is like an
undercurrent—as ominous and oppressive as the heat and humidity. If
you’re going to get freaked out by the violence, you couldn’t
function, so you kind of compartmentalize it. But I was always worried
that somewhere along the line, I would get stopped by the Klan or
whomever, and I would say, “I’m a student newspaper correspondent
doing a series on the movement,” and they [would say] “That’s
all well and good, but what are you doing staying with the
sharecroppers in the Freedom House?” And I would have no answer for
that. Fortunately, that never happened.

When Ed and I went to the Freedom Summer Reunion, we stopped off at
the church where they were having this ceremony to honor the local
people. We said to them, ”You guys were the real heroes because we
who came in always had our own reality to go back to. We could always
escape. But, you could lose your job, you could lose your homes, you
could be bombed, you could be jailed, you could be killed, and yet you
persisted in the movement. So, we’re here to honor you.”

TIANGA: ED, YOU’D SAID IN YOUR REMARKS AT THE CAPACD EVENT
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YOU HAD KIND OF A POSITIVE ATTITUDE ABOUT THE EVENTUAL SUCCESS OF THE
MOVEMENT FOR EQUAL JUSTICE IN THIS COUNTRY, AND YOUR REASON FOR THAT
WAS EXPERIENTIAL. TELL US MORE.

NAKAWATASE: There was probably no group of people in the United
States that were really more disparaged and despised, really, than
southern Blacks. I mean, if you can think of negative stereotypes,
southern Black people had all of them. So, given that as a starter,
then you had this great movement, which essentially said these are
people who are capable of governing themselves and making decisions
about what’s important to them. And they did. They organized
themselves, and they changed the country. And in the process, they
changed the perception of what Black people were, I mean, to non-Black
people. And I think to a lot of Black people too, actually.

I mean, it didn’t yet transform the economic structures of this
nation, but they put the lie to the [idea] that there are certain
things that had to be in place before you could govern yourself.
Whatever kinds of struggles happen afterwards, and whatever defeats
are experienced, and there are plenty of them—probably more defeats
than victories, really—the point is those of us who were there, we
know that you can change things in a very fundamental way, because
we’ve seen it.

WAKAYAMA: [Trump is] hopefully the last gasp of systemic racism in
your country. I believe he speaks to that portion of your country
which still clings to that sense of entitlement, that sense of white
is powerful, it’s the ultimate expression of all that is good,
because it was something that I had growing up, and that was something
that I had to deal with and had to overcome in some sense.

NAKAWATASE: I don’t know how many times I’ve heard younger people
say, “Well, nothing’s changed.” And my kind of visceral response
is, “Oh, you punk, yes, things have changed.” I mean, they
haven’t changed enough, and they haven’t changed quickly enough,
and they’re not as sweeping as they need to be. But, you can’t
tell me that there isn’t a difference between now and 1950, or 1925.
I mean, certainly, if you’re a person of color, it’s different. If
you’re a woman, it’s different. So, the struggle matters.

TIANGA: DO EITHER OF YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE THAT YOU’D LIKE TO GIVE TO
GROUPS WORKING WITH A PLACE-BASED APPROACH TO COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
AND ORGANIZING?

WAKAYAMA: I think it’s great there’s this coalition building, and
that [National CAPACD] conference encompassed incredible range of
groups all across the country, and yet their basic aim and their basic
modus operandi was the same, to give voice to people that lacked
voice, that lacked power, and to give them the tools and the means to
achieve that, which was, as I said to the conference, essentially what
we were doing in SNCC back in the ’60s. The only advice is keep on
keeping on.

NAKAWATASE: For me, one of the salient lessons of the SNCC experience
was that, ultimately, the communities have to address their needs, and
that the strategy of working where you live and with the people with
whom you live was crucial. [The] people [who] have to change
Mississippi, are people in Mississippi, and [same for] rural Georgia,
and Birmingham, and all these other places.

_Thank you._

_Shelterforce is an independent publication that serves (and sometimes
challenges) community development practitioners across the United
States._

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