Allegations about Richard Aoki

Cecile Lusby

 Allegations Regarding Richard Aoki – A personal response

Historical Context.

      To describe my connection to Richard Aoki it is necessary to review the shift in American society through the events that opened the 1960s.  If he were here, Richard, who died in 2009, would insist that I place his life and mine in historical and political context. 

1960 – protests of House Un-American Activities Committee in S.F.

1961 – JFK is the first Catholic US president, sit-ins and freedom rides.

1962 – the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee begins to organize.                                  

1963 - The March on Washington, Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech, the KKK’s church bombing in Birmingham, and the assassination of Kennedy.

1964  - the murder of civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, the Tonkin Gulf incident, the Free Speech Movement.

1965 - Anti War demonstrations begin, the Watts Riots in L.A.

     These events changed America and particularly how young people viewed freedom of speech and the movement to bring a measure of freedom to black citizens. Over a short period of time, Americans moved from optimism to disbelief in the government, its military, and the police.

      By the time I met Richard in 1966 we both believed that political change was necessary and that part of that change had to include the way civic officials and police treated black people.  I was 24 in 1966 and had briefly taken part in a community patrol of North Oakland where we walked in pairs to observe police. Since we walked during daylight, we really didn’t see much because danger, both criminal and official, usually comes at night.

The Personal is Political

      A friend at work introduced me to Richard in autumn of 1966, about eight months after my divorce was final. I would see Richard, then 28, in the neighborhood by the Telegraph Co-op, but always at a distance; I waved when I saw him in the bookstore or leaving the Laundromat next to the Co-op. When I had no money, I read standing up by the magazine rack, buying something on payday or when I had change left after my grocery shopping. I bumped into him there and he kidded me for reading the Rolling Stone, but did not scoff at the National Guardian or Ramparts. Richard read everything from Muhammad Speaks, the Black Muslim paper, to tiny socialist periodicals I had never heard of.

      On April 25, 1967 he appeared beside me on the street and handed me the first edition of the Black Panther Party paper saying, “Get yours now, hot off the presses.” I was on my way home, and as he handed over the paper, Richie persisted, wanting to tell me more, stressing that I should read the story of the shooting of Denzel Dowell by a Martinez Sheriff.

     “Where do you live?” Richard asked.

     “Down Ashby another block,” I answered and he said he lived around the corner from me on Stuart. By this time he had me confused because while he was like me, small and intense, he was an Asian-American man who ‘talked black.” He also had a definite strut when he walked. Richard asked if he could visit later to talk more so we could get to know each other. I invited him over the next evening, since I found him articulate and courageous.    

    When he arrived, my two preschoolers were at the kitchen table eating dinner. Since he didn’t really know me or my children, I waited for his reaction, the one I always knew was coming, the change in facial expression I had come to expect even in 1967 when people saw that they were half black. There was no shock on Richie’s face, just a smile. Right away, he won my heart. I hold on to that memory today, now that there is another story about Richard and allegations that stand at odds with my experience.

    When I was with Richard I could almost absorb the movement by osmosis; I was close to the fire.  When he dropped by or took me out for coffee or stood on my back steps for the last puffs of his cigarette, we talked about his ideas. Sometimes he popped by to talk and sometimes he showed up on his rounds trying to help someone in the BPP. He knocked on my door near midnight when I had to go to work the next morning to beg for bail money when the police put Dave Hilliard in jail for unpaid parking tickets. When I got sick, Richie watched the children and mopped the floor.  When we all went out—me, a pale brunette in my mid-twenties with my biracial toddlers and Richie, a Japanese-American, 5’6”, maybe 120 pounds at most, wearing a feathery mustache and his trademark sunglasses, we got second glances even in Berkeley.

     Our romance ended in late 1968, but we stayed friends, visiting every year or two, exchanging birthday cards every November and Christmas cards and phone calls from 1968 to 2008.  Forty years of friendship have kept my spirit from surrendering since August when Seth Rosenfeld brought a new story to the media.

The News from Rosenfeld

        Richard’s name has been in the news since August 20, 2012 after author Seth Rosenfeld’s allegation ‘outed’ him as an FBI informant. My first reaction was shock and quick denial. “Impossible!” I thought. Now weeks later, I have read parts of Rosenfeld’s new book, Subversives, all of Diane Fujino’s compelling 2012 biography of Richard, Samurai Among Panthers, and the 221 plus pages of the FBI files released online after Rosenfeld’s suit under the Freedom of Information Act on September 7, 2012.  Going through those files is frustrating since there are so few words on any page after the agency censored them to protect identities in the cases. Now I find it necessary to step away from Bureau documents and other people’s versions of his life to base my opinion on my own experience. I have read many articles and letters to editors, online blogs, and print media, as I felt obligated to educate myself to achieve the best possible understanding. I know now that Richard was more complex than I ever imagined.

    If you google the name ‘Richard Aoki,’ now, there are multiple sites covering opinion pieces and letters about Rosenfeld’s statement that Richard was an informant as well as his FBI files.  Look for Rosenfeld’s employer, the Center for Independent Reporting as well as Colorlines; they are the easiest sites to access, so you can see for yourself, or try to.

     My research confirms that Richard had an early connection with the FBI, but that something happened in May 1967 that changed him or his role with the FBI­­—something that is not accessible or available to me now online or in print. Until the FBI lets citizens read exactly what that incident was, I am lacking the basic data to make an informed decision. Fred Ho said, “The FBI thought they had their man,” suggesting that Richard was recruited, but did not serve. I believe May 1967 was the point when Richard’s role changed.

Diane Fujino’s account

  Diane Fujino’s Samurai Among Panthers is a flattering biography of Richard. She sat him down for eleven long interviews and the transcriptions are a joy to read. On these pages Richie is alive again, running his program down, talking the same way he always did. Fujino mentions in her endnotes seeing Richard’s FBI files as documentation of the FBI’s interest in his activities. Rosenfeld’s treatment of Richard is less than ten pages long and begins some four hundred pages into his book, Subversives, but his endnotes are amazing (of that, and the mystery of May, 1967, more later).

   The FBI files, censored as they are, do demonstrate a relationship that began in 1961 with recruitment records taking up some ten plus pages and on page 277 there is a last note with Richard refusing to continue in 1977. Asking when a person stops being an informant is like a judge or a lawyer asking a man “When did you stop beating your wife?”—any admission at all, and you’re culpable. 

      There is a case to be made that Richard’s entry into the FBI was a matter of entrapment, and I would like to make that case.

**                        **                        **                        **               **

Richard’s Past

      Richie was three and his baby brother, David only two when the law requiring Japanese- American removal from the Pacific Coast forced the Aoki family to Utah, to the Topaz internment camps in spring, 1942 just before Shozo Aoki was set to graduate UC Berkeley and become a pharmacist. With the death of that dream Shozo grew sullen and then he and his wife separated, Shozo took sole custody and did not arrange for the boys to visit their mother more than eight or ten times in the next decade. He home schooled his sons until relatives notified school attendance officers, sending the Aoki boys to Hoover Junior High School in West Oakland, where Richard was already running the streets of his neighborhood (largely African American since WWII.)

     Once back in West Oakland, Shozo shunned regular employment, preferring what Richard called the life of a small time hustler, a gambler who carried on relationships with the black ladies in his neighborhood.

     After some trouble with juvenile authorities, Richard transferred to Berkeley High and moved into his mother’s tiny apartment, and then Shozo disappeared altogether in 1956.  To be near his old running buddies, Richard took an AC Transit bus near Berkeley High, getting off in West Oakland nearly every afternoon, coming home only to eat and sleep. His mother’s $1.25 an hour wage barely covered rent and groceries, while tests revealed that both Richard and his brother David had IQs over 140. With college out of reach, his mischief continued. Richard stole and got into fights. He had a juvenile record by age 15 or 16. 

     Before Richard’s scheduled graduation in January 1957, he began to consider entering the military, but the barrier facing him was this record.

On p. 420 of Subversives Rosenfeld writes, “Mike Cheng told the author that Aoki had recounted that he had a juvenile record, but a judge said it would be wiped clean if he enlisted in the military.” When I read that passage, I remembered Richie telling me long ago about his record being sealed, and here Rosenfeld’s anecdote confirmed my memory. So there was a deal made before Richard got out of high school at seventeen, before he signed up for six months active duty and seven odd years of active reserves according to the Reserve Forces Act of 1955. The Army gave Richard a second chance as it did for my brother.

      Sometime between the end of high school and the completion of active duty an FBI agent named Burney Threadgill picked up Richard’s voice on a wiretap of the phone of known communists. Eighteen-year-old Richard was talking to the fifteen-year-old son of Saul and Billie Wachter, and in a matter of weeks Threadgill found the other number on the wiretap, called Richard, and made an appointment to talk with him. Rosenfeld writes that Threadgill asked Richard point blank what his interest in the Communist Party was, and Richard, then politically uncommitted, denied any interest in the CP.

 Trapped ?

     This is the scene I want to explore. What could Richard have done at that age? Were there any expressed or implied threats made by Threadgill? When Burney Threadgill asked him to go to visit the Communists and the Young Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Workers Party, was Richard free to say no? Was his military standing at risk?  Could the older man have turned Richard in to the House Un-American Activities Committee for associating with known communists or being a “communist sympathizer? Such things happened in 1957; it was still the McCarthy era and the FBI was the organization that investigated people who had unusual or unpopular ideas.

The Other Party

      There was a reason to begin this writing with the brief list of events in the early 1960s that taken together changed our society. There was an abolition movement to end HUAC’s reign of terror, but that sentiment was rare in 1957. The facts of Burney Threadgill and the FBI wiretap picking up Richard’s voice that year underscore the pressures in Richard’s life and his contradictions in the late 1950s. 

      Why would the FBI use wiretaps to pick up the calls of teenagers in the days before cell phones, when all phones were landlines? What would a teenage Richard have had to say at that time? And who was on the other end of the line?  Rosenfeld identifies the Wachter’s son, Doug Wachter, who had taken on his parents’ CP politics by the time he entered UC. He was an eighteen-year-old sophomore when he received his summons to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco in 1960, and the UC Berkeley Campus was abuzz. Word spread to S.F. State and suddenly both campuses planned a demonstration in San Francisco. On May 13 there was a protest in the Rotunda of City Hall, and when those students refused to disperse, the San Francisco Police turned fire hoses on them where they had assembled on the front steps, hurtling some of the group down the stairs.

      I was at home that evening, 18 years old, watching the news and was shocked see the hoses turned on the young people, especially shocking was the sight of a young woman who went bouncing down those steps in a skirt. This to me was a violation of freedom of speech. The sight upset me, but I saw the outside protesters, I didn’t see Doug Wachter testify inside during the hearings. I became a Politico at that moment, not a beatnik or a hippie.

        Was Richard free to refuse Threadgill’s request that he go to the CP and SWP and report back? The fear that HUAC instilled was very real, and may have influenced, if not determined Richard’s choice to cooperate with the FBI. Maybe he felt his back was against the wall and only became an informant under duress. Perhaps Richard’s loyalty to Threadgill was a twisted kind of gratitude. After all, the other boyon the wiretap, Doug Wachter, was turned in to HUAC.

A Look at the Files

     My method of inquiry has been to try to remember what events listed in the FBI files match my recall of personal or news events in 1967 and 1968, when I was dating Richard. The file includes reports that Richard was busy studying at UC Berkeley 1966 - 68, when he requested postponements because he was too busy. In 1967 there is little to see except one significant handwritten margin note, first dated in May with November jottings squeezed in above. The pages bear the typed date of June 30. I had just started going with Richard at the end of April that year, so I was interested in what happened in May. I found this entry on page 185 on the online Colorlines site displaying the reports, but according to FBI numbering at the lower right of each page, it is “p. AOKI 189.” When I looked to the notes of Nov 1 and 24, I remembered that Richard and I had a bad day that Thanksgiving, November23^rd. Richard showed up after dinner at my father’s house in Richmond in full Panther regalia, drunk and angry. He made quite an impression, and not in a good way. He drove my children and me back to Berkeley, swerving and braking and yelling at other drivers.

    “What’s wrong, Richard?”

    He bumped into a stalled car in front of us, and started to drive up on top of it.   I screamed.

     “Leave me alone,” he said.

     “Let me out then,” I said. The children sat terrified in the back seat, but Richard, his jaw set, backed down, swerved away, and drove on.

     When we finally reached my cottage on Ashby, I jumped out and rushed my crying children inside, locking the door behind me.  I didn’t know what had snapped inside Richard, I hadn’t done anything; He was under the influence before he got to my father’s house. Why had he worn the uniform if he was going to act out in front of my father, my children and me?  What was going on with him? It took weeks before I agreed to see him again. 

     When I saw the dated entries in the FBI files, I verified the date of Thanksgiving, so I know the day after, the 24^th, was a crucial deadline. On November 1^st there was a demand, then an ultimatum of November 24 as the last possible date to submit the report or be discontinued.  Agency language in reports is unclear in that it omits names, so I am guessing at what they wanted in the light of Richard’s extraordinary behavior with me November 23^rd.  If not a demand for supervisors to turn in observations or evaluations of Richard’s ‘reliabilty,’ then the November 1 request may have been a demand that Richard submit a report on the October 28 shootout in Oakland that killed Officer John Frey and wounded Huey Newton, chairman of the Black Panther Party.  I don’t think Richard met that deadline, or at least did not give any useful information.

        There are few entries for 1967, but there are many initials of supervisors beneath handwritten margin notes referring to a report from early May, which would have been the time when my relationship with Richard began. Newspapers on May 3 carried a frontpage photo of Black Panthers carrying guns into the State legislature in Sacramento on May 2^nd.  Richard wasn’t there. Was this the basis for the flurry of initials in Richard’s file? The notes with November dates appear above the May 4 entry.

     There is a regular FBI report format which includes Date, Stability and Reliability, and Indoctrination against Disclosure. On the typed portion under Stability and Reliability, the report states,

“It is believed that he is reliable….there is little indication that this informant will in the future become a source of embarrassment, however, the Bureau’s attention is drawn to information contained in referenced communication of

5/4/67”

     Try as I might I could find nothing more in those files from May. There is a May 4 report, but it has been almost completely redacted. I was eager to find something in Rosenfeld’s source material for his section on Richard, but was stunned when I found this quote on page 641 in the endnotes regarding the text on p. 423.

     “The November 16 report states that Aoki on May 1, 1967 told the FBI about his joining the Panthers.”  FBI #105-165706-22

      Not only was this sentence shocking, but I cannot find anything in the FBI files for November 16.  Rosenfeld goes on to say, “It appears that the FBI released this information to the author inadvertently.” Whether or not it was intentional, it is extraordinary and needs verification for readers. I feel obliged on the basis of all 221 pages of the FBI file to admit that my friend had been pressured into reporting on the CP, the YSA, and the SWP, but I cannot believe he would have informed on his brothers in the Black  Panthers.  Nobody who knew him in the BPP does.

    I believe Richard expected when he walked into the FBI office in San Francisco on May 1^st that he would be let go or identified as crazy then let go.  References to the incident in the later reports are typed under “Stability or Reliability” and a reference to 5/67. I cannot imagine what kind of a dance Richard had done from his 1961 entry until May, 1967, but this could be seen as a revolutionary act of coming clean; He did not talk about anyone but himself. Maybe it was a case of the spy who came in from the cold.  My guess is that Richard tried to exit the agency, but because of the Bureau’s reaction, was unable to make a clean break. Perhaps he had reason to believe that he would be exposed and the working lifespan of an outed FBI informant in late 1960s Oakland would have been short indeed. I have learned the word for this practice today is ‘snitch jacketing.’

   The number of initials on handwritten margin notes dated May and November, 1967 suggest that he was being watched after this incident.  There were check marks next to the category “Reliability.” From the time I first let Richard into my life, he always insisted the FBI was following him. He came by often to use my phone, believing his own phone was tapped. Eldridge Cleaver called and left abrupt messages with me for Richie to call him and when. In an amazing coincidence I also looked at Diane Fujino’s source material, since she refers to the FBI file as if Richard had been observed or investigated by the agency, as he had claimed to me. In Fujino’s endnotes for her biography, Samurai Among Panthers, on p.350 at the end of note #58, she says, “The FBI reported that Aoki resigned from the SWP in spring, 1967 (FBI report, November 16, 1967).  So Fujino also references the date November 16, 1967 in an FBI document. She saw it and says nothing about FBI inadvertence. Does Richard resign from SWP and announce his joining the Black Panthers on the same page or were there two distinct documents on November 16, neither of which is now available online.  Again it is impossible for citizens trying to verify this to succeed.

     I discovered that in the 1950s and 1960s there were 14,000 or 15,000 members of the SWP nationwide, and at the same time the FBI employed some 1,400 informants for the SWP, or one in ten persons in any meeting was an FBI plant.

Against a rush to judgment

    Richard began reporting back to Burney Threadgill about the SWP in 1957, under questionable circumstances, almost certainly he did not freely choose the role of informant, not at age eighteen, not after having his phone tapped talking to “known communists.” Threadgill called this ‘developing’ him: I would use the word ‘coercing.’  Richard began paid service to the FBI in 1961 and then ends his connection to the SWP in spring 1967, after a decade of intense involvement. Richard is on record in Fujino’s book as stating that his differences with the SWP were mainly over their reticence to participate (militarily) in the Black liberation struggle or support the right of self-defense and self-determination for Black people. Richard wrote a paper about his differences with the SWP. He talked to me about his commitment and his willingness to take action. When I began to see Richard he was very vocal about his disappointment with the Socialists Workers Party, and may have grown tired of the dispute.

     It is clear that Richard had begun moving toward the radical left in the early sixties, and whatever he may have said about being apolitical or voting for Richard Nixon in 1960, he studied for years until at some point, he was changed and truly radicalized. Richard was a revolutionary and a Marxist, who may have been persuaded or trapped into the role of an informant supplying reports from the age of eighteen or nineteen.

     Paradoxically, he valued his time in the US Army, and told me he joined to become a man and to learn how to use weapons. He was complicated, sometimes so militant I could have sworn he was crazy, but I had to be clear with myself that my beliefs were different from his, mostly because I had children to raise alone. I could not get arrested or risk losing custody because I could not bear to be without my children. Richard called me a “petty bourgeois vaccilationist.” I laughed when he said that, but he was absolutely serious. He said revolutionaries should not have children. I thought he was paranoid when he continued, announcing that he would never have a child because it might have been taken hostage and he wouldn’t want to make a choice that would compromise his political stance.  It was clear that his loyalties and interests were with the movement, not with domesticity. As his absences became longer, I had to make decisions for my future and for my children. I found another man, married, and seven years later that husband left. Such is life, but Richard and I remained friends.

    I cannot believe Richard would have betrayed the Panthers. He spent the years from 1973 to 1998 working with students as a teacher and college counselor and had been speaking out through those years about his role in the BPP and the Asian American Political Alliance and of the outrages of the internment of Japanese American citizens during WWII.  This was who Richard was; it was his legacy to us. His contributions to the Left are stellar;  hundreds and possibly thousands of people, myself included, credit him with changing their ideals, their understanding of history, and their politics. I believe in the old warning against judging a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.  In spite of the violence in the Black Panther Party, I take a hard line about the violence outside the BPP in the FBI’s co-intelpro practices.  The FBI is our nation’s secret police, and so I doubt whether any of us will be able to read or understand the mystery of Richard Aoki.

A Warrior's Journey

              A Warrior’s Journey


     In 1966 a coworker introduced me to a man she had met at a meeting of the Socialist Workers Party, a man she claimed was ‘a true radical’: Richard Aoki.  Richard and I started going out in 1967 right after he began passing out copies of the first issue of the Black Panther Party newspaper. I saw him as unusual and passionate about the Movement. I was a divorced working mother too busy to participate much, but I admired his dedication. His beliefs did not keep him from being involved with a woman with two biracial (Afro-American and Caucasian) children.
      We had a romance that lasted until late summer of 1968, but soon his political associations caused long absences. Before our relationship ended, he taught my son to tie his shoelaces and then kept watch over my youngsters when I had to go to the hospital for surgery, even mopping the floors of my small house.
      Richard lived with extreme stress in the late 1960s, a cigarette in hand and a slender stainless steel flask of vodka in the inside pocket of his jacket. He didn’t eat much and drank his coffee black. He explained that he was a revolutionary who should not have a family, but we remained friends even after I remarried and moved away. I never knew when I would pick up the phone and hear, “Hey, it’s Richard, what’s happening?”
     My connection to Richard continued for decades. The world had changed, with most people dropping out of the movement in the days of the ‘Me Generation.’ Richard reminded me that there were people who still believed, who never changed. In the decades when Richard worked as a teacher and counselor for Merritt College and Alameda College, he continued to look good and to talk about the old days and his time with the Black Panthers. But eventually, after he retired, he had issues with his health: a stay in ICU after major surgery, a vena cava repair, and a stroke.
    I made my last visit to his duplex in early fall 2008 and found him temporarily unable to walk. He got up in the night to find his meds, dizzy and in pain, and fell, bruising his coccyx. I had not realized he had become so fragile, and tried to be accepting when he sent me away, claiming his nausea was a reaction to taking pain meds on an empty stomach.
    The next year I lost five friends and Richard was one of them.  I did not get the news until the S.F. Chronicle’s obituary was published on April 26, 2009 citing complications from diabetes as the cause of his death that March 15. I felt forlorn that I had not heard earlier, but my grief would grow.
     News stories surfaced in the summer of 2012 that shook me to the core. On August 20th Seth Rosenfeld published his book, Subversives, portraying the FBI as setting up and sabotaging many student protesters in Berkeley, but also naming Richard as a paid informant of the agency.  In interviews promoting his book Rosenfeld revealed that on March 15, 2009 Richard had committed suicide by shooting himself. This is the same Seth Rosenfeld who wrote the original erroneous obituary for the San Francisco Chronicle in April 2009.              
     I read the August 20 book tour article online, read an excerpt on Amazon.com, and I watched the video on Huffington Post. I felt devastated and still do not believe it.
     When I look back on my friend of more than forty years, I see him as a product of his upbringing: his family broken up when sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in 1942, Richard returning to his old West Oakland neighborhood in 1946 to find it populated by Southern African-Americans who had come to work at the shipyards at Mare Island and Hunters Point, watching his grandfather brandish his old sword, Richard getting beaten up regularly out in the streets until he learned to fight back, and then his reputation earned him friends. I can imagine Richard when his father left home, a father whose internment at Topaz meant losing his place at UC Berkeley as a student pharmacist, finally turning to gambling and minor hustles.  I can picture Richard at the nearby junior high after being home schooled, getting in trouble before transferring to Berkeley High where he did well, graduating at seventeen. His mother and stepfather worked long hours at the family laundry, struggling to make house payments.
     Richard quickly joined the Army, making a deal at the time of his enlistment the same year to seal his juvenile records before serving a year of active duty as a medical assistant and an orderly.  Perhaps conditions were placed on his service, since it would have been unusual in the extreme for the Army to recruit a juvenile offender before the age of 18.
     Rosenfeld names one Burney Threadgill as the FBI agent who approached Richard in the year 1957, when Richard was 18. Threadgill wanted Richard to join various left wing organizations in the East Bay after picking up his voice on a wiretap on the home phone of a friend whose parents were identified as Communists.  Richard was not active politically at that time, but was recognized as a leftist by 1963. I know that when we were going together he expressed contempt for the American Communist Party, feeling it was inextricably linked to Stalin and his regime.  When I inquired about the SWP, Richard drove me to a meeting, but did not want to attend, introducing me to the chairperson and then leaving with other business before returning to drive me home at 9 PM. I gave up after two meetings since I did not agree with the concept of a revolutionary vanguard. Richard then announced his belief that the entire SWP membership was boojee while he was a real revolutionary, naming the struggle of the poor and people of color as his main concern.  In the 42 years of our friendship, he never strayed from this code, or never suggested to me or my children that his beliefs had waned. I regarded him as an encyclopedia of the Left, their organizations and their histories.
     Nobody knew the history of American progressivism like Richard. I was liberal, but too flexible for the doctrinaire Marxists of that era; my focus was on the responsibilities of a working mother. Richard knew that a family would divert his focus from his cause
    I remember taking calls from Eldridge Cleaver on my phone since Richard didn’t trust that his own phone was safe. My children answered my phone when I was in the basement doing laundry, so they took messages too, following the rules not to say names out loud. Richard took them to the Panther Breakfast Program a few times, and taught my daughter to spell her first proper noun, Huey Newton, on her blackboard.  Richard brought Little Bobby Hutton to my house once just a few months before he was shot.
      I cannot believe that Richard was a turncoat or a double agent, although as a conservative teenager, he may have been persuaded to join groups and talk about it. I believe he had a change of heart and converted to the worldview of the Left before joining the Black Panther Party.  The burden of proof is on Rosenfeld and/or the FBI to show what Richard disclosed. There are allegedly 4000 pages of documents that Rosenfeld has sued for under the Freedom of Information Act, but the FBI denies having a ‘main file.’  Something is wrong, and I suspect that Richard turned out not to have any worthwhile information, or at least not to have given it up. The man I knew would never have given any information of value. His name is on some documents, but they are non-specific, so I have doubts. I really wonder how the only activist named by Rosenfeld as informant in the 733-page text is a person of color and dead.
     What if it is true? I heard Richard deny it on tape, but at times he had an evasive way of expressing himself, wanting to be seen as revolutionary, but careful not to be too specific. He knew that there were mistakes made and excesses that brought down many of the Panthers. Anyone who read the newspapers knew that.
    Perhaps the FBI will eventually disclose the contents of the 4000 page file Rosenfeld describes. I suspect there is something very embarrassing for the agency in that file, and there are very few clear documents presented in the book. The unsavory history of the agency’s Counter Intelligence Program, or cointelpro, has been widely covered in the mainstream and alternative press. Rosenfeld himself discusses the topic in Subversives. Until I see better evidence, I will hold on to the memory of my friend’s integrity, and doubt the story of the FBI.  I know Richard Aoki lived with his history and stayed true to his code. He was a loyal friend when I needed one; that is how I will remember him.  I will stay loyal to my memory.                  
     

American Union

Cecile Lusby 1874 words
American Union

My seventieth birthday has presented me with the gift of time. I have survived to an age my mother and grandmother did not live to see, and so I can reflect and count my friends and family, living and dead, as well as changes in our schools and society that shaped my life choices.
I started school in 1947 at a time when my mother’s divorce caused us to move from place to place, school to school. Every school campus had a Sunshine Class situated inside a fenced off area where handicapped children were taught. Post-polio patients got around on crutches or wheelchairs, as did those with cerebral palsy. Downs’ Syndrome and “slow” students of all ages and sizes went to that area. Their playground fence set them apart from, but visible to the rest of the campus. Little fingers and hands poked out of the diamond shaped openings in the cyclone fence. I went up to touch their hands and talk to them only to be shoo-ed away before recess ended. The times required that these children be separate.
In fall of 1952 I was almost eleven when we moved in with our great aunt at the family ranch outside of Fresno. I started at American Union Elementary, having just finished fifth grade at St. Joseph’s in Berkeley. The other students in my new class had already chosen their own friends years before. In my second week I returned from lunch taking the back way and saw a girl standing inside the yard of the Sunshine Class. I waved to her.
In the next days we talked over the hurricane fence and got to know each other. She said her name was Benetta, but I could call her Beni. She was in sixth grade too, “But I don’t know why I’m in here. Somebody mixed me up.”
“How is that?” I asked.
“Look around, Ceci. Everyone here is handicapped or slow. What are the teachers thinking?” Beni’s brow furrowed.
Once in class again, I waited for everyone to get busy with deskwork before I raised my hand.
“What is it, Cecile?” Mrs. Matheson said.
“Can I check something with you?”
My teacher motioned for me to come up to her desk, where with my back turned to the class, I broached the subject on my mind. I murmured the story of Benetta and her problem. I asked why somebody didn’t take her out of Sunshine.
“Wait now, slow down, you better show me at recess.”
When the bell rang, the other students streamed out onto the playground, I took Mrs. Matheson out the back door to the little yard next door and pointed to my restless new friend in the Sunshine Class.
“I see, let’s go back now,” Mrs. Matheson said, ushering me once again to her desk. “You know that girl just started here.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes the colored children have to wait while we figure out where to place them. It takes time.”
“That’s easy,” I said. “She’s in sixth grade.”
“We know that many of the children who come from schools in the South are behind. They don’t get the same training or books as we do in California. They catch up eventually, but most are a year or two behind in reading.”
I listened for a minute, and then spoke up.
“Beni’s not from the South. She’s just moved here from Oakland, and I’m from Berkeley. There’s nothing wrong with her.”
This time my teacher was quiet.
“Cecile, let me write you a pass to the principal. I have to stay here with my students, but if you want to, you can go to see if Mrs. Sorenson will talk to you now.”
I took the pass and spoke to the principal as properly as I could, since this was my chance to speak up and I wanted to be heard.
“Mrs. Sorenson, if you just go over and talk to her, you’ll see she’s just fine. She talks so fast my mind can’t keep up with her. She has an uncle who’s deaf, so she knows finger spelling. She knows all the songs in her Hit Parade magazine by heart and some country songs, too.”
“All right then, I’ll look into it. You can go back to class now.” Mrs. Sorenson said.
I didn’t know what would happen, but the next week Mrs. Matheson opened the classroom door and Benetta walked in and took a seat. I was overjoyed.
Beni and I became inseparable after that. I had longed for a good friend I could share my innermost thoughts with, someone who would tell me her secrets, and someone I could say almost anything to. I invited her and another friend, Marylou Orozco over to our place one Saturday. We giggled and gossiped and sang along with the radio. Mama fixed a lunch of tuna sandwiches, but stayed in the kitchen that day. After the girls went home Mama sat me down to explain:
“Ceci, I want you to listen. You can have your friends, all sorts of friends now. But it’s time you knew you cannot be bringing home Negro or Mexican friends in seventh or eighth grade because things change in high school, and we do not mix with them socially in high school. Not at dances, and certainly not for dating.”
“Why can’t I keep the friends I have now?”
“Why? Why can’t you get your head out of the clouds, young lady. It’s just the way it is? Don’t make it harder than it already is.” My mother left the room.
This time there was nothing as obvious as a fence or a wall, but my mother had drawn her line, an invisible line. My face felt hot and yet I was shivering. Did other white mothers in our country know about this cutting off point? Was this the way everybody thought? Was it about the part of our US History book that said they used to count slaves as 3/5 of a person? The part of the book I thought was a misprint?
In the 1953 academic year Beni and I moved up to seventh grade and were still best friends. She was by this time tall and strong, a fierce tetherball opponent who slammed me down in seconds. We loved to sing together in the afternoon on the phone. While I could learn a song after the second hearing, Beni astounded me many times by having a song memorized after hearing it only once.
Beni was advanced physically as well, already wearing a bra at age eleven. I was still in my fifth grade undershirts, standing about four feet, nine inches, but in the back of my mind I knew I was on the same path to puberty, and that I would catch up. I could not race ahead, nor could I slow the changes in Beni. Never for a minute did I think of time passing in terms of eighth or ninth grade and my mother’s deadline. There was still the rest of seventh grade ahead of us.
Her family were Jehovah’s Witnesses who did not celebrate holidays, nor believe in saints, so we decided not to talk about religion to avoid arguing. When spring came she didn’t wear green for St. Patrick’s Day. At the end of April, the tether pole turned into a May pole for our May Day festival. Fresno began to heat up, and then came baseball. Before the end of the school year, Beni wanted me to go with her to the playground so she could sit and watch the boys practice. She had her eye on one boy I didn’t know, one who rode on her school bus. I saw him across the field, and saw her staring. He ignored her, and strutted around the other players flexing his muscles. He started yelling and swearing at the other boys within his earshot.
“Do you really like that boy, Beni? Listen to his language!”
“Come on, Ceci. He’s just kidding around. To me, he’s cute.”
“You’re better than that. He’s not good enough. Why would you want that ni…..?”

I saw her draw up next to me. I heard her gasp.
I looked up at the instant the light in her eyes went out. I had hurt my friend, and now she was up on her feet, furious.
“I heard you, Ceci. How could you say that?”
“Oh my God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. Not you…”
I stammered. I had been trained never to use that word.
“I thought you were my friend, not prejudiced,” she said. “Now you? Even you? “ She looked at me. “Yes, even you.” She turned her back and walked away.
The next day she wouldn’t talk to me, or the day after that. I kept my head down on my desk. I read. Mrs. Matheson asked me what was wrong. The whole class noticed our falling out. The weekend came and went and by Monday I was beside myself.
“Beni, please. I said I was sorry. Won’t you be my friend again?”
“Will you swear not to say that word ever?”
“Of course, “ I said. We tried again to be buddies until the end of the school year and after that we had just our phone calls. It was difficult then, strained. Nothing was ever the same. Then Mama put me back in Catholic school when we moved away.
I never saw Beni again. The decades went by and I looked her up on Google. She is a business owner, an entrepreneur who founded a civil rights organization dedicated to fighting the KKK. Her program has lasted for over 30 years. She never married, and never had children. She is her own boss.
As for me I left home at 19 and the next year I ran off with a black man, married, had two children and divorced, causing my mother to cut off all communication for twenty years. My children and I grew up together, went to college, and made good lives, but I still feel a lump in my throat whenever I remember the day I used the N word. It reminds me of my imperfection and of my failure to live up to my standards. But my remorse drove me to work harder to remove racial barriers in our country. Beni’s memory mobilized me to intervene the day my daughter Morgan called after she arrived at middle school before her records did and was put in a special education class because she looked African American. I knew how stranded a misplaced child could be from watching my friend at American Union.
Strangely enough it was not until my seventieth birthday recently that I remembered the day I went to Mrs. Matheson and then to the principal, to speak up for my friend and get help for her. With that recollection I have another lens to look through to see my behavior and my character in a more balanced way. Now I can move beyond regret to remember my friend, Beni, and give thanks for the year that changed my course and set me on my path.

On not forgetting Broderick Street

Cecile Lusby                                                                                                   1655 words                

                                                                                                                                                           

 On Not Forgetting Broderick Street

   

        Housing advocates marked 2010 as the opening of the Zygmunt Arendt House and its forty-seven affordable senior apartments. Arendt, an immigrant investor, died in 1998 leaving San Francisco a gift of six million dollars, to be divided between the needy (60%) and children (40%). For the ‘needy’ portion of the charitable trust, planners decided to rebuild the red brick structure at 850 Broderick Street.  This construction went forward with no mention of the nationwide social agency once located at that address or the troubled young women who came from all over the country to stay there over the course of fifty years.

     The Arendt project involved demolishing the old structure to make a new complex with forty-seven small apartments for formerly homeless seniors. The old place held a certain fascination for those of us who once lived there. We were the Crittenton girls.  After the publication of Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away in 2006, my curiosity was renewed and I returned to look around and take photographs.  It was sad to see the building vacant and neglected. Then I saw the sign announcing the ‘future home of the Zygmunt Arendt House’.

     850 Broderick was the address of the Florence Crittenton Home.  The brick dwelling on the corner of Golden Gate and Broderick housed unmarried pregnant women.  No girl could enter until she was seven months along.  In the months before entering, the girls lived at home, lingering inside for months. Once their pregnancy showed, most girls left town.  It was a relief to move to Crittenton’s and stop hiding.

     Society has changed: we no longer ‘disappear’ our pregnant teens. Urban Renewal has changed the face of the city, demolishing homes and apartments in both the Western Addition and in the Fillmore. This neighborhood was once a depressed area, but is upscale again in today’s multicultural market.  What difference would one more missing landmark make in the creation of the Arendt House? Why would anyone care about the history of that address now?

      After admission to the Home, we had a choice—to stay indoors and wait passively or go out and look around. Those of us who were fit enough for exercise soon discovered on our walks that there were very few white people nearby.  Thus Crittenton’s kept the secret of its white, middle class clients. Another rule was that we never used our last names; the director advised against forming close friendships, because in a couple of months we would move on, away from this secret. In the protocol of the late 1950s and 1960s, we all were supposed to give up our babies and leave the Home a few weeks after giving birth.

    Moffitt Hospital gave us obstetrical care and San Francisco Social Services assisted in foster care placement prior to each adoption. As soon as a Crittenton infant was born, nurses carried it out of the delivery room down the hall to a designated crib in the nursery for a couple of days until social workers drove that child to a foster mother where adoptive parents came to collect their new baby.  This practice persisted from 1949 until the 1970s, when society allowed girls to keep their babies. From that time on there was little need for seclusion or secrecy, and in time fewer women used the facility.

       History shows a number of changes in the way society has treated unwed mothers.  In the 19^th century US orphanages housed babies without fathers, and then foundling homes cared for both illegitimate children and influenza orphans after the pandemic of 1918-1919.  A single mother was expected to turn over the baby and go her own way. Settlement Houses changed that practice in American cities of the early 20^th century, sending unmarried mothers back to school to train as nurses or teachers while female staff workers provided child care for one or two years.

      By the Great Depression, the economic downturn ended tolerant attitudes and a changed society discouraged promiscuity and pregnancy out of wedlock. The post WWII era extended social condemnation of unwed mothers by viewing them as the ones primarily responsible for their fatherless babies and accordingly, their own plight. The maternity homes of the post WWII did not rehabilitate: they housed girls in a boarding house fashion until they delivered and then provided adoption services for their infants.

      The loosening of social norms in the late 1960s and the practice of private ‘open adoptions’ meant that maternity homes had to re-organize; 850 Broderick assumed the name, Florence Crittenton Services. Their new mission was to work for the needs of young women who chose to keep their babies. Over the next decade each mother shared a room with her infant. By the late 1980s the critical population Crittenton focused on was ‘at-risk’ mothers with drug histories, violent boyfriends, or more than one child.

      After getting my credential, I did some on-call counseling at the Crittenton Home in the 1990s, and found the changes after thirty years mind-boggling. There were new rules about not opening the front door without looking through the peephole to be sure it was client, and not a thug. Family arguments in the visiting room made the environment so dangerous that on occasions the police had to be called. Crittenton’s staff had a hard time controlling drug traffic on the premises. Residents screamed demands and epithets at the staff.   The Home was having a hard time dealing with the overwhelming issues clouding the lives of the residents.  I stopped going there when I got a better job.

      Then silence. Did the problems disappear? Did they escalate and implode? Where maternity homes once kept girls secluded to prevent their being recognized, a couple of decades later single moms could live with their babies in a changed culture.

       How could such dramatic changes in women’s lives go unrecorded?  In my research-by-walking-around mode, I could find no one on or near the premises, no way to do any fact checking. I began to search through library records and microfilm to track the changes of the last half-century. The results of my efforts were disappointing.

     After three hours with the San Francisco Historical Society, I walked away empty handed. I had a few pages of a Florence Crittenton pamphlet and nothing about the city’s other maternity home, nearby St. Elizabeth’s Infant Hospital on Masonic.  No articles on San Francisco’s unwed mothers’ homes now exist after decades of society requiring that girls and women be confined there.

     I also used Santa Rosa Library’s microfilm reader to go through the index of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1904 to 1959 and 1950-1980.  I found results only in the late 1940s announcing fund raising efforts and then construction in 1949. There was one article in 1951 on the election of officers for the Ladies Auxiliary. Otherwise nothing remains in that index. There are no articles under ‘Unwed Mothers’ or ‘Unwed Mothers’ Homes’, nothing under ‘Maternity Homes.’

      The lack of information is understandable: unwed mothers’ homes offered confidentiality; at a time in our history when unmarried pregnancy meant disgrace, secrecy was required.  There were no newspaper articles that might compromise a resident’s identity. A virtual blackout of information on the social practices involving the birth mothers persists from 1949 to 2000.

       Unmarried pregnant women are simply expectant parents now.  The shift was gradual, but it did happen. Should this aspect of San Francisco’s history go unwritten? A system of special and separate treatment persisted for at least forty years at this San Francisco site alone, involving most American institutions: Medicine, Education, Social Services, the Law, and the Family.  Until the passage of Title 9 in 1973, pregnant girls were expelled from high school when their condition became obvious. There were no consequences for the boys. There were no DNA tests to prove paternity and determine financial responsibility, no birth control was prescribed without a doctor seeing a wedding ring, (no birth control at all could be sold in several states on the East Coast), no reproductive choice, no legal abortions until Roe v. Wade in 1973, no ‘morning after pill’ for a sixteen-year-old after a date rape. 

    Was it all a dream? 

    When the brick façade came down at 850 Broderick, there was new housing for San Francisco’s low-income seniors at the Arendt House, and that surely is something to celebrate. But where is the whole history of the place?  What will mark the passing of a social institution intended to separate and confine women then seen as out of bounds and out of control?

     My stay was more than fiftyyears ago, and though I later married and had children I could keep, I never stopped wondering what happened to my first baby. With a lot of work I found him - after a forty-three year search. The last generation of women that society expected to give up their babies delivered them in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. By 2012, those women are 40 years older, somewhere between 55 and 70 years old at this writing; the women from the 1940s and 1950s are aged or dead by now. Ann Fessler calculated a figure of one and a half million American women who surrendered babies in the years between 1945 and 1973.  I write to remember them, to grieve for their exile and estrangement, and to bear witness.

        I send my best, bright hopes to the senior citizens who find affordable rentals at the corner of Golden Gate and Broderick. I hope they enjoy their new facility and can walk around the neighborhood as we once did. But I will remember that address all my life. I will remember my sisters, outsiders of fifty years ago and feel at my back the ghosts of the girls we were.

   

The Zygmunt Arendt House

Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers at 850 Brodrick Street

Operated from 1949 – 2007 in San Francisco

The last days of the old Crittenton Home.