'Solidarity Is Our Future': May 19th Project Amplifies the Power of Working Together
At the age of 18, Mary "Yuri" Nakahara, a Japanese American teenager living in San Pedro, wrote her "philosophy of life." She vowed to "never humiliate or look down on any person, group, creed, religion, nationality, race, employment or station in life, but rather to respect (others)," and "to repay every kindness, but should such a circumstance not arise, to pass it on to someone else."
The time was 1939. In less than three years, with the start of World War II, her father was dead after being incarcerated and likely tortured by the FBI as a suspected Japanese spy. No government official ever provided evidence to back up the allegations. For the duration of the war, she and the rest of her family were rounded up into concentration camps with 120,000 other Japanese Americans.
While she was imprisoned in camps in Arkansas, Nakahara, who would become known to the world as Yuri Kochiyama, volunteered for the USO at nearby Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where the segregated, all-Japanese American US Army 442nd battalion was based. There she witnessed the Jim Crow segregation that dominated the lives of Black Americans. These years transformed her from an American flag-waving Christian into someone deeply concerned with the injustices of the world.
Throughout her 93 years, she tried to abide strictly by her philosophy of life. Yuri Kochiyama lived a life of solidarity during the momentous times that followed the war.
Kochiyama and her husband Bill, a Nisei soldier who she met at Camp Shelby, settled in Harlem to raise a family. She began organizing with her Harlem neighbors for integrated education and civil rights. She became involved with efforts to free political prisoners and to decolonize Puerto Rico. It was through her activism that Kochiyama became friends with Malcolm X, who admired her willingness to challenge his perspectives. She would join Malcolm's Organization of Afro-American Unity, as well as the Nation of Islam.
It was during one of the Kochiyamas' legendary potluck dinners at their home where Malcolm would meet hibakusha, survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even today, postcards sent by Malcolm to the Kochiyamas during his travels to Africa and beyond stand testament to the deep friendship the two rights activists shared. Apart from a belief in society's power to change, these two legendary activists would also share something unexpected: a birthday on May 19th.
We named this series "The May 19 Project" to focus on what their lives and their friendship represent: a sustained and enduring expression of solidarity. These two freedom fighters dedicated their lives to advancing the rights of their people and worked to make freedom for all. Solidarity is the work of seeing each other, standing together and acting for each other. Their examples still call us to imagine and make a new world.
This imagination has sustained us during a time when we, like many other Asians and Pacific Islanders in the U.S., have felt particularly vulnerable. This period of surging hate incidents came into focus at the start of 2020, when former president Trump and other demagogues used the language of violence to divert attention from their failure to adequately address the coronavirus pandemic.
Before the bloody spring of 2021, when white shooters committed mass murders of Asian women in Atlanta and Sikhs in Indianapolis, many of us were living with a sense of dread. In part it was because we knew our history.
The "sick Oriental" is a centuries-old trope. In 1875, the Page Act — which was followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act — banned Chinese women from entering the United States. They were seen as prostitutes and vectors of disease. Then as now, racist ideas fed racist violence. Historians have documented over 300 purgesduring that period in which white rioters destroyed Asian settlements, rounded up the residents and forced them to leave or lynched them.
But during this time we also were heartened by the collective moments of clarity that the Black Lives Matter movement produced. Twenty-six millionAmericans protested the police murders of George Floyd and other Black people. Americans called for structural change, including reparations, police reform and abolition. The Asian Pacific, Black and Hispanic congressional caucuses stood side-by-side to denounce violence against Asians.
And then came the backlash.
The truth is that our lives have also been characterized by interdependence, mutuality and community.
You may have seen viral videos of violent assaults on Asian women and elders by perpetrators who appear Black or Brown. Acts of violence do happen between members of different communities of color. Because of the legacies of racial segregation, we mostly live together rather than in predominantly white communities. But all the evidence shows that most acts of anti-Asian violence have not been committed by other people of color, but by whites.
Yet these videos seem to reinforce persistent and particularly harmful racial stereotypes that pit Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders against other communities. Here, too, history is instructive. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, the stereotype of a boot-strapping, compliant Asian American Model Minority was deployed against the accelerating demands for Black equality.
In Los Angeles in 1991, the twin narratives of Asians as permanent foreigners — here to extract resources — and Model Minorities — proxy victims for whites who had long fled the city — ratcheted tensions with other communities of color, particularly Black Americans. When Du Soon Ja killed Latasha Harlins, the kindling was in place for what became the Los Angeles uprisings.
The truth is that our lives have also been characterized by interdependence, mutuality and community. But those stories have been forgotten, or hidden. Solidarity defined Asian Pacific America before its beginning, and solidarity, too, is our future.
In 2021, a team of dozens of filmmakers, writers, performers, artists, cultural strategists and organizers came together to form the May 19th Project. We produced 14 videos illustrating stories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders working in solidarity — across ethnicity, race, class, gender and generation — that span over 150 years.
They begin with the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass making an impassioned defense of Chinese, Japanese and South Asian immigrants in America, and a young restaurant worker named Wong Kim Ark winning his case in the U.S. Supreme Court affirming the right of the children of immigrants born in the U.S. to be citizens.
The idea of the "Asian American" or the "Pacific Islander" was only possible because of the Black freedom movement, which imagined citizenship for all during a time when people of African descent like Frederick Douglass were still largely enslaved. The 14th Amendment made it possible for all immigrants to become naturalized and for their children to receive birthright citizenship. The stories we tell show how moments of reciprocity have defined and continue to define us.
At a time when segregation, restrictive covenants and redlining meant that AAPIs, other people of color and marginalized Americans were separated from white neighborhoods, new cultural forms flourished in vibrant, multiracial neighborhoods such as San Francisco's Fillmore District. It was home to Black, Filipino, Japanese and Jewish families. There, in a basement in the 1950s two teenage girls, Sugar Pie DeSanto and Etta James, forged a musical friendship that changed the direction of R&B. During the 1960s, Bruce Lee and his student, the NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, swapped martial arts lessons and books on Third World anti-colonial movements. They would co-star in Lee's classic 1972 movie, "The Game of Death."
We've seen how solidarity has transformed labor, education and immigration movements. In the fields of California's Central Valley, Filipino worker leaders including Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz launched the 1965 grape boycott and joined forces with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to build the United Farm Workers, one of the most important labor unions in history. On a 340-mile march through to Sacramento, they were joined by Yemeni farmworkers, white faith leaders, Black activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Solidarity for the boycott spread across the globe.
In that same decade, Black civil rights leaders and Japanese Americans joined forces to repeal the Emergency Detention Act, to ensure that Black activists would not be rounded up in concentration camps as Japanese Americans were.
On the streets of Detroit, the daughter of an immigrant restaurant owner,Grace Lee Boggs and auto worker James Boggs, helped to lay the intellectual foundations for our racial justice movements.
At the border of Cambodia and Thailand in the 1970s, Bayard Rustin, the architect of the March on Washington who had introduced the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr., mobilized civil rights leaders to welcome Southeast Asian refugees.
For most of the 20th century, shared traumas of mistaken identity, enforced labor, imposed segregation, material expropriation and episodes of brutal violence brought Asians and Pacific Islanders of very different backgrounds together. By the late 1960s, young people of Asian descent had begun to call themselves "Asian Americans" and organized against the Vietnam War and racism. The thought that such diverse peoples — with different languages, religions and ways of life, who were sometimes fleeing conflict alongside each other — shared much in common was, in fact, a leap of faith.
The "Asian American" or "Pacific Islander" was not meant to merely signify a number for a census category. They were, from the start, acts of solidarity. So together we made Asian Pacific America through shared experiences of food, music, religion, custom, culture and joy. Solidarity may begin as a necessity for people to find belonging, safety and peace. But then it becomes the energy that powers the building of vital, healthy, generous communities.
On the steps of San Francisco State College, a multiracial coalition of Asian, Latino, Black and white students staged the longest student strike in US history to demand Black and ethnic studies. They set the foundation for ethnic studies in classrooms across the country. Fast forward to the 2000s,undocumented immigrant youth of all backgrounds emerged from the shadows together to win DACA protections.
The portrayal of Asian Pacific Islander Americans as insular, selfish and foreign needs, once and for all, to be put to rest. We know that this stereotype has never matched reality. In 1991 over 1,000 gathered in Washington DC for the pathbreaking 1st National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, where Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans helped launch a multi-racial environmental justice movement.
In the wake of tragedy and discrimination, we've seen AAPI communities reach out, not inward. In the days after 9/11, the murder of Balbhir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, led the Sikh community to join in solidarity with fellow Muslim and Arab Americans to call for racial justice.
In May of 2020, a Hmong refugee named Youa Vang Lee saw the video of George Floyd's murder, as he called for his mother. Mrs. Youa's own 19-year-old son was also killed by Minneapolis police, and she urged other Asian Americans to protest in support of the Floyd family. Meanwhile Sammie Ablaza Wills and veteran AIDS activist Vince Crisostomo and Sammie Ablaza Wills, who was born years after the start of the crisis, are building a caring intergenerational community for Northern California's LGBTQ+ community as we write this.
These are timeless stories. They remind us that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have always acted in solidarity within their community and with other communities. Most Americans had never heard of these stories, but we were astonished to see that, upon their release, our videos reached more than 40 million people. We were all deeply moved to learn — again — that we were not alone.
In the moment, we are all called to manifest what Yuri Kochiyama taught us — that our place in U.S. society has been secured by the acts of solidarity made on our behalf, especially the Black American freedom struggle, and that our future is dependent upon the solidarity we show to our own communities and other communities.
In our final video, the poet Michelle Lee defines us as a people "keenly suited to this sacred task of threading justice to joy, stories to solidarity, persistence to power, and our pursuit of freedom." She urges us to dream a new America together.
Come watch, share and dream with us together.
