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.