[News] Diane Fujino book tour, Samurai among Panthers, Sept 8-11, Bay Area

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*Diane Fujino’s book tour for Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on 
Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life.*
//
*1) ** Saturday, September 8, 10 AM – 12 noon, Museum of African Diaspora*
685 Mission Street (at Third) | San Francisco, California 94105 | 
415.358.7200
http://www.moadsf.org/visit/calendar.html?month=9&year=2012&id=675
*2) **Sunday, September 9, 4 PM, EastSide Cultural Center*
2277 International Blvd | Oakland CA 94606 | 510-533-6629
http://www.freedomarchives.org
http://www.eastsideartsalliance.com
*3) **Monday, September 10, 5 PM, San Francisco State University, 
location TBD*
*4) **Tuesday, September 11, 6:30-8 PM, Oakland Public Library, Temescal 
Branch*
5205 Telegraph Avenue | Oakland, CA 94609 | (510) 597-5049
_http://www.oaklandlibrary.org/events/temescal-branch/diane-fujino-samurai-among-panthers_
On Diane Fujino’s response to the charge of Aoki as FBI informant,
Read more: 
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Where-s-the-evidence-Aoki-was-FBI-informant-3808396.php#ixzz24KmdM4sL__
_ _
And another article…
*Chronicle of Higher Education*
August 31, 2012
*Scholars Challenge Author's Assertion That 1960s Activist Worked for FBI*

A new book's claims that Richard M. Aoki was an FBI informant rely on 
ambiguous sources, critics say.

<http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Challenge-Authors/134040/?key=QG9yIFBuYiEUMHFqZWkUZToEYH1tYkJxa3Eda3t0bl5TFQ%3D%3D> 

By Peter Monaghan

Was Richard M. Aoki, an icon of the 1960s protest movement in the Bay 
Area, an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation?

That's the explosive claim made by Seth Rosenfeld, a journalist who has 
just published /Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and 
Reagan's Rise to Power/ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the product of 31 
years of research.

The allegation has angered Asian-American community groups and Bay Area 
activists of that era, including veterans of the Black Panther Party. 
Mr. Aoki famously supplied that organization with weapons in 1966 when 
the Panthers mounted their armed self-defense campaign, saying they 
needed firearms to stand up against police violence and harassment.

Mr. Rosenfeld goes further, suggesting that Mr. Aoki armed the Black 
Panthers under direction from federal agents. That claim, if proved, 
would be of huge significance to scholars who study the protest 
movements and the history of surveillance. The notion that federal 
authorities, presumably under orders from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, 
armed the Black Panthers would place in a new light the violence that 
followed, including armed confrontations in which police officers and 
activists were killed.

"If you're going to make that a central claim of a book, you're going to 
be held to a high standard of proof," says Donna Jean Murch, author of 
/Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black 
Panther Party in Oakland, California/ (University of North Carolina 
Press, 2010).

Historians like Ms. Murch, an associate professor of history at Rutgers 
University, say Mr. Rosenfeld's claim is unsubstantiated and warrants a 
more rigorous investigation than he gave it.

His allegation came to public attention in August when the /San 
Francisco Chronicle/ published his article on the subject, timed to the 
release of his book; Mr. Rosenfeld also released a video report on the 
Web site of the Center for Investigative Reporting. The charges against 
Mr. Aoki account for only about 10 pages of the more than 700 in his 
book, which examines FBI activities concerning the University of 
California at Berkeley during the cold war. The evidence it relies on 
includes some 300,000 pages of FBI records released as a result of Mr. 
Rosenfeld's Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

But Mr. Rosenfeld's critics say that his accusations against Mr. Aoki 
rely on one former FBI agent, now deceased, who said he was Mr. Aoki's 
handler in the years before his political activism, and one FBI 
document, redacted and, critics say, ambiguous.

*More Evidence Needed?*
Mr. Rosenfeld writes that Mr. Aoki, as a young man in the late 1950s and 
early 1960s, passed on information to the FBI on groups whose meetings 
and other activities he attended. At that time, Mr. Aoki was in trouble 
with local police for petty crimes. He then spent time in military 
service where he became a weapons expert, and only later became 
politically active. He quickly came to prominence after winning the 
confidence of Black Panther leaders, some of whom he had come to know 
before the organization was formed, while he and they were enrolled at 
Merritt College.

As a Japanese-American activist, Mr. Aoki's acceptance by the Panthers 
was considered remarkable. He later was a key figure in the student 
strikes that the Third World Liberation Front organized in 1968 at San 
Francisco State College and then the University of California at 
Berkeley. He then worked for many years as a community-college counselor 
but returned to Bay Area political activism during the first decade of 
this century, until his death in 2009.

While Mr. Aoki might conceivably have had entanglements with 
law-enforcement figures early in his adult life, and been singled out as 
a possible informant by FBI agents, his actions, over all, hardly seem 
consistent with expectations of how an FBI informant would behave, says 
Diane C. Fujino, a scholar of Asian-American studies at the University 
of California at Santa Barbara. Her biography of Mr. Aoki, /Samurai 
Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical 
Life/ has just been published by the University of Minnesota Press.

"Anything is possible, and so I'm open to the truth," she says. "But I'd 
need to see substantial evidence."
Some historians say it does make sense to ask what Mr. Aoki's role was, 
exactly: After all, he was able to have a stash of weapons, and to 
supply the Panthers; some researchers believe the FBI would very likely 
have been aware of this and yet Mr. Aoki didn't find himself in any 
serious legal trouble.

However, the scholars object, that question doesn't justify the 
assertion that Mr. Aoki acted as an informant over a long period of 
time, into the late 1960s and beyond, and even worked to turn protest to 
violence.

In response, Mr. Rosenfeld says he makes no assertion that Mr. Aoki 
helped the FBI disrupt political movements. (In an e-mail to /The 
Chronicle/, he said would not have time before this article went to 
print to respond to the specific criticisms that researchers have made 
about his allegations.) But his book does include such statements as: 
"Did Aoki help the Panthers fight for justice, or did he set them up? 
During the same period Aoki was arming the Panthers, he was informing 
for the FBI," and "he had given the Black Panthers some of their first 
guns and weapons training, encouraging them on a course that would 
contribute to shootouts with police and the organization's demise."

The evidence Mr. Rosenfeld presents dates from the period in which Mr. 
Aoki attended activists' meetings but before the Black Panther Party was 
even formed. A key consideration, says Yohuru R. Williams, an associate 
professor of African-American history at Fairfield University, would be 
to assess what kind of information he might have provided authorities, 
and under what circumstances. Mr. Williams, who has written extensively 
about the Black Panthers, says that Mr. Rosenfeld appears to draw a 
conclusion based on slight evidence, then projects it forward as a 
surmise about Mr. Aoki's role in key events in Panther history.

Mr. Williams, like Scott Kurashige, a professor of American culture and 
history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who specializes in 
the history of Asian-American political and social activism, criticizes 
Mr. Rosenfeld for apparently relying on one FBI document, and on his 
interviews with one former FBI agent, Burney Threadgill Jr., who died in 
2005. While Mr. Rosenfeld writes that the FBI document—which has 
recently circulated among scholars, including Mr. Williams and Mr. 
Kurashige—identifies Mr. Aoki as an informant, it is in reality far more 
ambiguous, say the critics.

That Mr. Aoki may have given some information to the FBI is "plausible," 
says Mr. Williams, because "anyone who had dealings with any of the 
organizations that were on the FBI radar, there's a very good chance you 
were visited, or that agents would have made contact."

But the FBI, even this late after the events of that era, almost always 
conceals the identity of its informants, Mr. Williams says, and the 
appearance of Mr. Aoki's name on the document Mr. Rosenfeld has does not 
prove at all that the bureau was referring to him as such.

"It seems he has chosen to draw the boldest conclusions about Aoki for 
the period of time when his evidence is weakest," says Mr. Kurashige.

He and other historians suspect that Mr. Rosenfeld's FBI source, Mr. 
Threadgill, may even have been spreading disinformation as a way of 
discrediting activists. That, note the critics, would be in the spirit 
of the FBI's infamous Cointelpro campaign against domestic political 
organizations from 1956 to 1971.

"When you move into the shadowy world of federal surveillance," says Mr. 
Williams, "it creates an unsettling and uncomfortable feeling for 
scholars, a lot of the time, because you can't trust what it is you 
think you're looking at."
*
A Clash of Cultures*
In some ways, scholars' reactions to Mr. Rosenfeld's work reveal 
tensions between academe and journalism. For example, his critics say 
Mr. Rosenfeld's sourcing is irresponsible. In his /San Francisco 
Chronicle/ account, Mr. Rosenfeld writes in reference to a taped 2007 
interview between himself and Mr. Aoki: "Asked if this reporter was 
mistaken that Aoki had been an informant, Aoki said, 'I think you are,' 
but added: 'People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer.'" But in Mr. 
Rosenfeld's video feature, the words "people change" are not heard on 
the tape and appear not to have been in that part of the interview.

As other evidence for his case, he cites a second former FBI agent, M. 
Wesley Swearingen, who made a sworn declaration as part of one of Mr. 
Rosenfeld's lawsuits against the FBI, saying he "concluded ... that Aoki 
had been an informant." In the video feature, Mr. Swearingen explains 
that part of his reasoning was that Mr. Aoki could have spied 
unsuspected in Black Panther ranks because he was "Japanese"—reasoning 
that Mr. Rosenfeld's critics disparage as absurd.

What also bothers the critics is that Mr. Rosenfeld does not cite recent 
books by historians and other scholars—people like them—on topics like 
surveillance and the role of state "subversion" during the Panther era.
"If this were a scholarly work, it would not survive academic peer 
review," says Mr. Kurashige. "I dare say that it would likely fail even 
a dissertation defense."

For his part, Mr. Rosenfeld suggests at least one of his critics has 
selfish motives. In an August 29 letter 
<http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/LETTER-TO-THE-EDITOR-Fujino-misstated-facts-3824862.php#ixzz24zAg7vHn> 
to the /San Francisco Chronicle/ responding to criticisms Ms. Fujino had 
published there, he wrote, "Fujino presents herself as an objective 
scholar, but she is a competing author with a vested interest."
http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Challenge-Authors/134040/?key=QG9yIFBuYiEUMHFqZWkUZToEYH1tYkJxa3Eda3t0bl5TFQ%3D%3D



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