"Perhaps the Japanese are to be thanked?" Asia, Asian Americans, and the construction of black California

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Volumn 11, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 135-181

  Widener, Daniel ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 4344668192     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11-1-135     Document Type: Article

References (169)

1. Los Angeles Weekly, 5 May 2000;
2. New York Times, 8 May 2000;
3. Los Angeles Times, 3 May, 10 June, 7 July, 12-13 September 2000.
4. On multiculturalism in Los Angeles, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1996), 84-96.
5. The "conflict" literature on blacks and Asians is extensive and includes numerous articles, dissertations, and journalistic accounts. Book-length treatments include Kwang Chung Kim, ed., Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999);
6. Edward T Chang and Jeannette Diaz-Veizades, Ethnic Peace in the American City (New York: New York University Press, 1999);
7. Chang and Russell C. Leong, eds., Los Angeles-Struggles toward Multiethnic Community: Asian American, African American, and Latino Perspectives (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993).
8. The phrase autonomous but intertwined appears in Ernest Allen, "When Japan Was Champion of the Darker Races: Satohata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism," Black Scholar, no. 24 (winter 1994).
9. On the impact of Japanese power on African America, see Marc Gallicchio, The African Ameri-can Encounter with Japan and China (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
10. Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998);
11. George Lipsitz, "'Frantic to Join . . . The Japanese Army': The Asia Pacific War in the Lives of African American Soldiers and Civilians," in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1997).
12. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
13. On the literature concerning the international dimensions of interwar black radicalism, see Robin D. G. Kelley, "But a Local Phase of a World Problem: Black History's Global Vision, 1883-1950," Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999);
14. Kelley, "A Poetics of Anticolonialism," Monthly Review 51, no. 6 (November 1999);
15. and Kelley, "The World the Diaspora Made: C. L. R. James and the Politics of History," in Rethinking C. L. R. James, ed. Grant Fared (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 103-131.
16. For Langston Hughes, see "Soviet Theater in Central Asia," Asia, October 1934, 590-593;
17. Hughes, "Tamara Khanum: Soviet Asia's Greatest Dancer," Theater Arts Monthly, November 1934, 829-835.
18. On African American Maoism, see Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, "Black Like Mao: Red China and the Black Revolution," Souls 1, no. 4 (fall 1999): 6-41.
19. On African American engagements with the postwar Afro-Asian movement following the Bandung Conference, see Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996),
20. and Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1997).
21. On the international impact of postwar black radicalism, particularly the influence of the Black Panther Party, see Kathleen Neal Cleaver, "The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party, 1969-1972," in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles Jones (Baltimore, Md.: Black Classics Press, 1998);
22. Cleaver, "The Israeli Black Panthers: Fighting for Credibility," Victimology 1, no. 3 (fall 1976): 403-413;
23. Vijay Prashad, "Afro-Dalits of the Earth, Unite!" African Studies Review 43, no. 1 (April 2000): 189-201.
24. Robert Conrad, "The Planter Class and the Debate over Chinese Immigration to Brazil, 1850-1893," International Migration Review 9 (spring 1975): 41-55;
25. Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1999);
26. Wally Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);
27. Lee Tom Yin, The Chinese in Jamaica (Kingston: Chung San News, 1963);
28. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, "Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers: The Chinese of Mexico and Peru, 1849-1930," Amerasia Journal 15, no. 2 (1989): 91-116;
29. Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985);
30. Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970);
31. Juan Jimenez Pastrana, Los Chinos en la historia de Cuba, 1847-1930 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1983);
32. Denise Helly, ed., The Cuban Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba (1876; Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);
33. James Loe wen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971);
34. Robert Seto Quan, Lotus among the Magnolias: The Mississippi Chinese (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1982).
35. Moon-Ho Jung, "The Influence of 'Black Peril' on 'Yellow Peril' in Nineteenth-Century America," in Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies, ed. Gary Y Okihiro et al. (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995);
36. Frederick Douglass, "Composite Nation," speech held before the Colored National Labor Union, founding convention; "Bring on Your Coolies: Who Cares," missionary record, rpt. in The San Francisco Elevator, 26 November 1869;
37. both reprinted in Philip S. Foner and Daniel Rosenberg, Racism, Dissent, and Asian Americans from 1850 to the Present (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 223, 231, 234-235.
38. Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (New York: Norton, 1998), 78.
39. Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 130.
40. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989), 101-102;
41. Dan Cauldwell, "The Negroization of the Chinese Stereotype in California," Southern California Historical Quarterly, June 1971.
42. For a work that traces the role of whiteness and racial conflict beyond the urban boulevards of San Francisco and Sacramento, see Susan Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton, 2000).
43. Rudolph Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 88-89;
44. Marco. R. Newmark, "Calle de los Negros and the Chinese Massacre of 1871," Southern California Historical Quarterly, June-September 1944, 96-98.
45. Foner and Rosenberg, Racism, Dissent, and Asian Americans, 210-213.
46. Günther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964);
47. Lonnie Bunch III, Black Angelenos: The Afro-American in Los Angeles, 1850-1950 (Los Angeles: California Afro-American Museum, 1988), 20.
48. Arna Boateraps, Anyplace but Here (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 266
49. (originally published as They Seek a City [Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1945]);
50. Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pierce, 1946).
51. Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 74-78.
52. John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los Angeles, 1900-1942 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press);
53. William M. Mason and John A. McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: History Division of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, 1969);
54. Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (New York: Free Press, 1988);
55. George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 88-92;
56. Lawrence B. De Graff, "The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930," Pacific Historical Review, no. 39 (1970): 323-352;
57. Bunch, Black Angelenos.
58. George Sanchez, "The Other Los Angeles: Chicanos, Jews, and Japanese on the Eastside, 1925-1945," Los Angeles Vertical File, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Library.
59. Matt garcia's insightful discussion of the interracial world of postwar dance halls located in the El Monte neighborhood offers one example of precisely such an intercultural history. See matt garcia, "Memories of El Monte: Intercultural Dance Halls in Post-World War II Greater Los Angeles," in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America, ed. Joe Austin and Michael Willard (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
60. De Graff, "City of Black Angels," 331;
61. Modell, Racial Accommodation, 17-20.
62. Henry Yu's recent work examines the debates surrounding the Pacific "Survey of Race Relations." Yu relates how initial sociological treatments of the "Oriental problem" utilized previous research on the "Negro problem" as an analytic template. Yu also explores the extent to which certain California-based researchers disputed the validity of the comparison. See Yu, Thinking Orientals, 38, 42;
63. Emory S. Bogardus, The New Social Research (Los Angeles: Jesse Ray Miller, 1926), 37;
64. Lipsitz, "Frantic to Join," 331;
65. Scott Kurishige, "Transforming Los Angeles: Black and Japanese American Struggles for Racial Equality in the Twentieth Century" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2000);
66. Koyoshi Uono, "The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation and Dispersion of the Japanese Residences in the City of Los Angeles" (master's thesis, University of Southern California, 1927), 104-105.
67. Bogardus, New Social Research, 10, 234-239. Both the Japanese and African American communities attracted considerable sociological attention during this time. The massive, although unfinished, "Survey of Race Relations" on the Pacific Coast utilized research teams drawn from universities from Los Angeles to Vancouver.
68. For information on this project, which lasted from 1924 to 1926, see Yu, Thinking Orientals. The National Urban League commissioned a coterminous project authored by Charles S. Johnson, a former student of Robert Park, entitled "Industrial Survey of the Negro Population of Los Angeles." In addition, USC students under the direction of Emory Bogardus produced several dissertations dealing with both groups.
69. Bette Yarbrough Cox, Central Avenue: Its Rise and Fall (Los Angeles: Beem, 1993), 127, 139;
70. Johnny Otis, Upside Your Head: Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993), 21;
71. Britt Woodman, Buddy Collette, and Marshall Royal, in Central Avenue Sounds, UCLA Oral History Project, Special Collections, UCLA.
72. Los Angeles Japanese Daily News, 1 January, 2 May 1927, 29 May 1939;
73. Paul Lopez, in Central Avenue Sounds, UCLA Oral History Project; Lon Kurashige
74. "The Problem of Biculturalism: Japanese American Identity and Festival before World War II," Journal of American History 86, no. 4 (March 2000).
75. Charles Miagus, Beneath the Underdog (New York: Knopf, I971), 36-40.
76. W E. B. Du Bois, "Colored California," Crisis, August 1913;
77. Los Angeles California Eagle (hereafter California Eagle), 5 September 1914.
78. California Eagle, 29 January 1916;
79. "Negro Vote Factor against 'Anti' Wave," Rafu Shimpo, 28 July 1940;
80. Scott Kurashige, "Transforming Los Angeles," chap. 5, 41.
81. On local reactions to Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W Griffith, 1915),
82. see Emory Tolbert, The UNIA in Los Angeles: Ideology and Community in the Garvey Movement (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, 1980), 34;
83. Bruce Tyler, From Harlem to Hollywood: The Struggle for Racial and Cultural Democracy, 1920-1943 (New York: Garland, 1992), 35.
84. On The Cheat (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1915),
85. see Gina Marchetti, "The Rape Fantasy: 'The Cheat' and 'Broken Blossoms,'" in Asian Americans: Experiences and Perspectives, ed. Timothy Fong and Larry Shinagawa (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2000).
86. California Eagle, 24 June 1921.
87. Negro World, 24 March 1923.
88. See also "Report by Bureau Agents A. A. Hopkins and E. J. Kosterlitzky, Negro Activities: UNIA, March 26, 1921,"
89. rpt. in The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, ed. Robert A. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3:279, including n. 2,
90. and Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, 52, 57 (James Weldon Johnson quotes), 67.
91. On emigration to Baja California, see Ted Vincent, "Black Hopes in Baja California: Black American and Mexican Cooperation, 1917-1926," Western Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 3 (1997).
92. Arnold Shankman, " 'Asiatic Ogre' or 'Desirable Citizen': Images of Japanese Americans in the Afro-American Press, 1867-1933," Pacific Historical Review, no. 46 (1977);
93. David Hell wig, "Afro-American Responses to the Japanese and the Anti-Japanese Movement, 1906-1924," Phylon, no. 38 (1977);
94. "Baseball News from across the Pacific," Los Angeles Japanese Daily News, 16 May 1927;
95. See Kelley, "But a Local Phase." On Ethiopia, see Cedric Robinson, "The African Diaspora and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis," Race and Class 27, no. 2 (1985);
96. Joseph Harris, African American Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936-1941 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994);
97. William Scott, The Sons of Sheba's Race: African Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1941 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
98. Critical works of great breadth for this period include Plummer, Rising Wind, and Von Eschen, Race against Empire. On Spain, see Robin D. G. Kelley, "This Ain't Ethiopia, But It'll Do: African Americans and the Spanish Civil War," in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 123-160.
99. For Caribbean links, see Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuentes, Between Race and Empire: African - Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998);
100. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998).
101. On India, see Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston: Beacon, 1992). This moment is also extraordinary for the wealth of works produced by black radicals of the period, including George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and W E. B. Du Bois, as well as marking a turning point in the anthropological revalorization of black culture in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, continental Latin America, and the United States.
102. On the anticolonial language of Japanese colonialism, see Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
103. Gallicchio, African American Encounter, 3;
104. Allen, "When Japan Was Champion," 30.
105. On Malcolm X, see Kelley, Race Rebels, 171.
106. Kim Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-abolition São Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 109;
107. Lesser, Negotiating National Identity, 157-160;
108. Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, 54;
109. Jeff Chang, "Yellow Man with a God Complex: Satohata Takahashi and Black Nationalism," unpublished paper in possession of author; Plummer, Rising Wind, 69.
110. On the specificity of black interest in Japan within Harlem, see Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon, 2001);
111. on California, see Charlotta A Bass, Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper (Los Angeles: Charlotta A. Bass, 1960),
112. and Bunch, BlackAngelenos, 36-37.
113. Shankman, "'Asiatic Ogre,' "575;
114. Hellwig, "Afro-American Responses," 94;
115. "Report by FBI Agent Hannigan," DNA, RG 38, file no. 20964-2194G, rpt. in Hill, Garvey Papers, 3:236-237.
116. Hill's discussion of the relationship between the Japanese government and local Japanese organizations is taken in part from Yuji Ichioka, "Japanese Associations and the Japanese Government: A Special Relationship, 1909-1926," Pacific Historical Review 66, no. 3 (August 1977).
117. Negro World, 10 June 1922;
118. "Report by Special Agent P-138, New York City, 6 August 1920" and "Report by Special Agent P-138, New York City, 6 August 1921,"
119. rpt. in Hill, Garvey Papers, 3:546-547,632-633.
120. Garvey's deep interest in Japan was, to some extent, reciprocated. Hill notes three articles published in Japan dealing with the subject of Pan-Africanism, including Shoichi Midoro, "Garvey, the Negro" [Kokujin Garvey], Kaizo 4, no. 1 (January 1922);
121. Kametaro Mitsukawa, The Negro Question [Kokujin mondai] (Tokyo: Niyu Meicho Kankokai, 1925);
122. and Toyonosuke Takimoto, General View of the Negro Question [Kokujin mondai taikan] (Tokyo: Chuo Uo Jigyo Kyokai, 1928).
123. See Hill, Garvey Papers, 7:19. It is not my intention to equate all Pan-African sentiment with Marcus Garvey or the UNIA. During this period, however, the UNIA became the primary force disseminating such ideas. Moreover, Garvey's quote about models anticipates subsequent Afro-Asian linkages, Frantz Fanon's celebrated passage concerning the unsuitability of either Europe or America as a model for decolonizing states, and the whole corpus of African American antirevisionist Marxism, which often found in Mao Tse-tung's thought a path to revolutionary left politics that could seemingly sidestep engagement with more theoretically Eurocentric Marxist variants.
124. Emory Tolbert, UNIA in Los Angeles;
125. "Report by Bureau Agent H. B. Pierce," 25 April 1921,
126. "Bureau Reports, Los Angeles, 24 November, 1919,"
127. rpt. in Hill, Garvey Papers, 2:154;
128. Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammed (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 109;
129. and Gary Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 114-115.
130. George Lipsitz, "Frantic to Join," 340;
131. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (London: Pluto, 1986), 4;
132. Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000);
133. Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
134. Carey McWilliams, Prejudice: Japanese Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944);
135. Mauricio Mazon, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984);
136. Kevin Leonard, "Years of Hope, Days of Fear: The Impact of World War II on Race Relations in Los Angeles" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1992);
137. Keith Collins, Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-1950 (Los Angeles: Century Twenty One, 1980);
138. Taylor, Racial Frontier, 251-277.
139. California Eagle, 18 December 1941, 1 January, 8 October 1942;
140. Plummer, Rising Wind, 75.
141. Thelma Thurston Gorham, "Negroes and Japanese Evacuees," Crisis, November 1945;
142. "The Race War That Flopped: Little Tokyo and Bronzeville Upset Predictions of Negro-Nisei Battle," Ebony, July 1946;
143. "Common Ground," letter in John Anson Ford collection, box 74, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Daily News, 10 September 1945; Pilgrim House reports, John Anson Ford collection, box 76, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
144. "Japanese Collegiate Club to Present Negro Culture Program at City College," California Eagle, 14 February 1952.
145. Kevin Allen Leonard, '"Is That What We Fought For?' Japanese Americans and Racism in California: The Impact of World War II," Western Historical Quarterly 21, no. 4 (November 1990): 480. The deployment of the model minority concept gathers steam a decade after the end of the Pacific War, gains speed following the urban rebellions of the 1960s, and climaxes during the Reagan administration.
146. See William Peterson, "Success Story, Japanese American Style," New York Times Magazine, 9 January 1966;
147. "Success Story of One Minority in the U.S.," U.S. News and World Report, 26 December 1966;
148. "Asian Americans: A 'Model Minority,'" Newsweek, 6 December 1982;
149. David Bell, "The Triumph of Asian Americans," New Republic, July 1985, 24-31.
150. On the inconsistencies, problems, global implications, and political dimensions of the concept, see Ronald Takaki, "The Myth of the Model Minority," in Takaki, Strangers, 474-484;
151. Robert G. Lee, "The Model Minority As Gook," in Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999);
152. and Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), esp. 157-184.
153. On changes to black Los Angeles during the post-Fordist period, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1992);
154. David Grant, Melvin Oliver, and Angela James, "African Americans: Social and Economic Bifurcation," in Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Roger Waldiger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr (New York: Russell Sage, 1996), 379-408;
155. and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 242-243.
156. On Asian American Los Angeles during the same period, see EuiYoung Yu, Earl H. Phillips, and Eun Sik Yang, eds.,Korean Los Angeles: Prospects and Promises (Los Angeles: Center for Korean-American and Korean Studies, California State University Los Angeles, 1982);
157. Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994);
158. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992);
159. Lucie Cheng and Philip Q. Yang, "Asians: The Model Minority Deconstructed," in Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, Ethnic Los Angeles, 305-344.
160. For perspectives on both, see Chang and Leong, Los Angeles-Struggles;
161. and Robert Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Rebellion (New York: Routledge, 1993).
162. Grant, Oliver, and James, "Social and Economic Bifurcation"; Paul Ong and Tania Azores, "Asian Immigrants in Los Angeles: Diversity and Divisions," in Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng, New Asian Immigration, 100-132.
163. "2009 Persons Attend Cultural Programs at Soto, Michigan," California Eagle, 23 November 1953;
164. Takaki, Double Victory, 223.
165. Hugh H. Smythe, "Suiheisha: Japan's NAACP," Crisis, February 1953.
166. George Yoshida, Reminiscing in Swingtime: Japanese Americans in American Popular Music: 1925-1960 (San Francisco: National Japanese American Historical Society, 1997), 31-39, 203-204.
167. Some Japanese gangs dated to well before the war. See Lon Kurishige, "The Problem of Biculturalism." For information on the world of nisei street gangs during the 1950s and 1960s, their relationship to African American gangs, and the transition into the radical nationalist formations of the new left, see "Them Bad Cats," a three-part series published in Gidra, January, June, and August 1973.
168. Frances Williams, "To Hell with Bandanas," oral history transcript, Center for Afro-American Studies Library, UCLA;
169. Fred Ho, interview by the author, January 2001, C Train, Brooklyn, N. Y.