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<big><big><b>Diane Fujino’s book tour for Samurai among Panthers:
Richard Aoki on
Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life.</b></big></big>
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<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><b
style=""><span style=""><span style="">1)<span style=""> </span></span></span></b><b
style=""><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Saturday, September 8,
10 AM – 12 noon, Museum
of African Diaspora</span></b></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">685
Mission Street (at
Third)<span style=""> </span>|<span style="">
</span>San Francisco, California 94105 |<span style="">
</span>415.358.7200</div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span
style="color: blue;"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.moadsf.org/visit/calendar.html?month=9&year=2012&id=675">http://www.moadsf.org/visit/calendar.html?month=9&year=2012&id=675</a></span></div>
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<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing"><span style=""> </span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><b
style=""><span style=""><span style="">2)<span style=""> </span></span></span></b><b
style=""><span style="">Sunday,
September 9, 4 PM, EastSide Cultural Center</span></b></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span
style="">2277
International Blvd<span style=""> </span>|<span style=""> </span>Oakland
CA 94606<span style=""> </span>| 510-533-6629</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span
style="color: blue;"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">http://www.freedomarchives.org</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.eastsideartsalliance.com">http://www.eastsideartsalliance.com</a><br>
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<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing"><span style=""> </span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><b
style=""><span style=""><span style="">3)<span style=""> </span></span></span></b><b
style=""><span style="">Monday,
September 10, 5 PM, San Francisco State University, location TBD</span></b></div>
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<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><b
style=""><span style=""><span style="">4)<span style=""> </span></span></span></b><b
style=""><span style="">Tuesday,
September 11, 6:30-8 PM, Oakland Public Library, Temescal Branch</span></b></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span
style="">5205 Telegraph Avenue<span style=""> </span>|<span style="">
</span>Oakland, CA 94609<span style=""> </span>|<span style=""> </span>(510)
597-5049 </span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><u><span
style="color: blue;"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.oaklandlibrary.org/events/temescal-branch/diane-fujino-samurai-among-panthers">http://www.oaklandlibrary.org/events/temescal-branch/diane-fujino-samurai-among-panthers</a></span></u><span
style=""></span></div>
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<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style="">On
Diane Fujino’s response to the
charge of Aoki as FBI informant,</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal"
style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; -moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-inline-policy: continuous;"><span
style="color: black;">Read more: </span><a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
href="http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Where-s-the-evidence-Aoki-was-FBI-informant-3808396.php#ixzz24KmdM4sL"><span
style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153);">http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Where-s-the-evidence-Aoki-was-FBI-informant-3808396.php#ixzz24KmdM4sL</span></a><u><span
style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153);"></span></u></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal"
style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; -moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-inline-policy: continuous;"><u><span
style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153);"><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></span></u></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal"
style="background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; -moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-inline-policy: continuous;"><span
style="">And another article…</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span
style="font-size: 24pt;">Chronicle of Higher Education</span></b></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">August 31, 2012</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span
style="font-size: 24pt;">Scholars Challenge Author's Assertion That
1960s
Activist Worked for FBI</span></b></div>
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style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""><br>
</span><span style=""></span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">A new book's claims that Richard M.
Aoki was an FBI informant rely on ambiguous sources, critics say.</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><a
moz-do-not-send="true" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
href="http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Challenge-Authors/134040/?key=QG9yIFBuYiEUMHFqZWkUZToEYH1tYkJxa3Eda3t0bl5TFQ%3D%3D"><span
style="color: blue;"><br>
</span></a><span style=""> </span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">By Peter Monaghan<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">Was Richard M. Aoki, an icon of the
1960s protest movement in the Bay Area, an informant for the Federal
Bureau of
Investigation?<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">That's the explosive claim made by
Seth Rosenfeld, a journalist who has just published <i>Subversives:
The FBI's
War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power</i> (Farrar, Straus
and
Giroux), the product of 31 years of research.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">"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 <i>Living for the City:
Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in
Oakland,
California</i> (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">His allegation came to public
attention in August when the <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i> 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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span
style="">More Evidence Needed?</span></b></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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, <i>Samurai
Among
Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life</i>
has just been published by the University of Minnesota Press. <br>
<br>
"Anything is
possible, and so I'm open to the truth," she says. "But I'd need to
see substantial evidence."</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">In response, Mr. Rosenfeld says he
makes no assertion that Mr. Aoki helped the FBI disrupt political
movements.
(In an e-mail to <i>The Chronicle</i>, 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."<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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."<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">"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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">"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."</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span
style=""><br>
A Clash of Cultures</span></b></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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 <i>San
Francisco Chronicle</i> 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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">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.</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">"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."<br>
<br>
</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span
style="">For his part, Mr. Rosenfeld suggests
at least one of his critics has selfish motives. In an </span><a
moz-do-not-send="true" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
href="http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/LETTER-TO-THE-EDITOR-Fujino-misstated-facts-3824862.php#ixzz24zAg7vHn"><span
style="color: blue;">August 29 letter</span></a><span style=""> to the
<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>
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."</span></div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="yiv545800479MsoNormal"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
href="http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Challenge-Authors/134040/?key=QG9yIFBuYiEUMHFqZWkUZToEYH1tYkJxa3Eda3t0bl5TFQ%3D%3D">http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Challenge-Authors/134040/?key=QG9yIFBuYiEUMHFqZWkUZToEYH1tYkJxa3Eda3t0bl5TFQ%3D%3D</a></div>
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