Memories of Richard, Revised 2015

Cecile Lusby 2411 words Memories of Richard, Revised 2015 I met Richard Aoki in fall, 1966 but did not see him a second time until late April 1967 when he was passing out the first issue of the Black Panther Party newspaper. “Here it is, hot off the presses,” Richard said. I never doubted the sincerity of his political beliefs, and if Richard liked you, you had a friend for life. Our romance lasted little more than a year, but we stayed friends for forty years. Many radicals in the East Bay name Richard as an influence, as initiating them into revolutionary thinking. So to see the recently released FBI files this year after Seth Rosenfeld of the Center for Independent Reporting finally gained access was devastating. When we first began seeing each other, we talked in my kitchen where Richard smoked and talked politics incessantly. I remember him taking a pen from his jacket pocket and asking for some paper. He quizzed me when I told him about my connections before my short-lived mixed race marriage. My information was pretty old since I had been a working mother from 1963-1967. Richard started up, “So who did you know at San Francisco State?” “I met a lot of kids who were with Don Warden’s Afro-American Association in 1962 and I dated one of the speakers.” Richard had shared that he attended a meeting or two and watched the speeches on Fillmore and on the U.C Berkeley campus. “That’s an old story, the black activist dating white girls. Don’t laugh, but I went to the Black Muslim mosque in Oakland and in the City. Those girls keep their distance, not interested in Asians, I guess. So this guy you were seeing, what were his politics?” “It was an odd mix of Pan-Africanism and Marxism.” So the conversation flowed with Richard taking the time to fold the paper into four sections labeling each Black nationalists, cultural nationalists, Muslims, and one for opportunists or apolitical academics. Richard mentioned the names of young men he knew in San Francisco and in Oakland who had also spoken on street corners, and I added my names. All my friends were involved in the civil rights movement and talked of little else. After an hour or so, the exercise ended and he returned the list on the paper to me. I felt close to him after sharing my memories of radicals and rascals I had known before my life as a mother began. It was exciting in 1967 to talk with an adult, or anyone older than a kindergartner. These were the first few weeks of our romance. As the revelations of his role as an FBI informant were published in 2012. I felt anger, confusion, and regret. I am still uncertain whether he had used or divulged any of my names on the list we worked on, since it was still in my possession. Among the newest items in the FBI files added in 2015 was his report on the history of the Black Panther Party, including the observation that “Only top leadership appeared knowledgeable of or interested in the political philosophy taken from Mao, Robert F. Williams, and Malcolm X Little. (sic)” While the rest of the Left had hopes that our American civil rights movement would produce its own freedom fighters, in this report Richard showed disappointment that the Panthers were not following some foreign brand of socialism : Chinese, Soviet, or Cuban. Richard could and did spend hours talking about the history of Communism and Marxism when he wasn’t talking about Berkeley radicals. He told me he considered UC students bourgeois or apolitical, seeing himself as revolutionary – a lone wolf. The irony is that Seth Rosenfeld’s Subversives shows that Richard started very early studying communism and Marxism at the behest of the FBI. He almost surely received money off the record to do his studies and to attend meetings of Young Socialist Alliance and Socialist Workers Party (YSA and SWP). Before his official hire date as an informant, Richard had been preparing himself to associate with radicals. Once hired in 1961 the typical stipend was about one hundred dollars a month, which would pay rent in mid 1960s in West Berkeley or in the old apartments on south side of campus. The money allowed him to work less and circulate more - study more. He told me he worked nights at a print shop ((Oakland Ink). He introduced me to his co-worker Andy Higashi, so I know he was employed. He also told me when he stayed over on a week-nights that he would have to leave at 6AM to help train the young cadres in West Oakland in the safe handling of weapons. So his life was lived at odd hours. Richard was full of contradictions. He told me he was a conservative when he joined the Army for six months of active duty in 1957 right after his 18th birthday, but was a Radical by the end of 1964. This was the story he gave to everyone, that the US involvement in the War in Viet Nam changed his perspective. Yet the FBI file shows his work as an informant at UC Berkeley’s Viet Nam Day Committee in 1965, as Rosenfeld shows in the endnote #420 page 642. Of course I didn’t know any of this during my relationship with him. My first idea after hearing about Richard’s double life was that he was sincere when he joined the FBI, then was radicalized and continued to play a game of informing. The record shows his failure in 1967 to be at meetings or turn in reports to the FBI. I can remember when he told me his role with the Black Panther Party was coming to a close and that he “had to lay low” immediately after Huey Newton shot Oakland Police officer, John Frey late in October. Richard was trembling when he showed up that night and the next day said he had decided to confine his activism to campus organizing at U C Berkeley in 1968 to prepare for a Third World Department. By the end of summer 1968 we had pretty much stopped seeing each other. He would drop by for a minute to talk about the movement or bring a friend to introduce to me. In the last few years I have sought out some of these friends to question when the reports surfaced about Richard’s work as an FBI informant. One was a young man Richard mentored who was still working at UC Santa Barbara in 2012 when I called to compare notes. I shared that though Richard claimed to hate Eldridge Cleaver, Cleaver called me to leave messages and phone numbers at my place and there was an odd silence on the other end. “He wasn’t supposed to be talking to Eldridge,” the voice said. In the first frantic months after Huey’s arrest October 28, 1967, Eldridge was still a spokesman and a leader until his sudden exile in late 1968. I felt foolish. In the deeply divided Black Panther Party Richard was close enough to the Huey Newton faction that he should have followed directions. Richie made the calls from my phone and needed privacy, telling me the FBI had his home phone bugged, and that the FBI was after him. In his book Subversives Seth Rosenfeld names an FBI agent named Burney Threadgill as the one who recruited or “developed” Richard, using a tape from wiretapping the phone at Doug Wachter’s home. Doug’s Communist parents were being investigated by the FBI at a time when both boys were at Berkeley High. The recording had both Doug Wachter and Richard Aoki in conversation. Richard had had his 18th birthday in November, 1956 just before he graduated high school January 1957, entering a six months period of duty in the US Army active reserves the next month. After the disappearance of their father early in 1956, Richard and his brother were living with their mother who supported the whole family on her $1.50 per hour wage as a laundry worker. His mother was patriotic and happy to see Richard join the Army, and he always told me the army made a man of him. He would have returned home about August, 1957 to stay again with his mother. Threadgill claims to have sent Richard out to study Communist front groups in Berkeley beginning with the Trotsky-ite group, YSA or Young Socialist Alliance. Since I know he resigned from YSA in early 1967, that means he maintained a nearly ten-year association. The FBI hired him as an informant in1961 according the file that readers can see online, with the most recent reports finally added in June 2015. I believe that he began as an informant when young, fairly conservative, and needing money. Threadgill’s recruiting methods may have bordered on blackmail. His juvenile record was expunged and he worked to distance himself from his friendship with Wachter and to prove worthy in the sight of the Agency. Douglas Wachter did not reply to my 2015 inquiry. I began my relationship with Richard Aoki in late April 1967 and we broke up on Thanksgiving, November 23, 1967 after he picked me and my children up at my father’s house, under the influence, perfectly groomed, in a Panther uniform: black pants, leather jacket, and beret. He drove like a mad man, swerving across lanes and bumping into two cars while waiting at red lights. He waved a handgun. He behaved as I had never seen before so that when he dropped us off, I grabbed my children and ran inside. I did not see him for two weeks when he apologized and promised never again, etc., but that his first duty was to the revolution. He promptly asked me for a donation to help pay BPP minister David Hilliard’s parking tickets. I forgave him. When I was looking for 1967 information in Richard’s file, there is a change in May which had been whited out or censored, leaving only a series of dates written in the margin and a demand that Richard submit reports after he reported resigning from the Socialist Workers Party and joining the Black Panthers. On p.189 there were about six different dates and clear evidence that he was not delivering his reports on time, then a final demand under the typed date of 6/30/67 “See my lets 2/27, 4/12, 5/4/67” The recommendation block was empty (redaction or white-out) but there was handwriting above and beside it. “Immediately submit 4 mo. evaluation letter re: cautioned informant. Letter was due 11-1-67. Continued delays of this nature will result in discontinuance of informant.” Under the whited out block was a final date of 11/24/67, the day after Richard’s drunken Thanksgiving drive with me on November 23. Those familiar with ‘discontinuance” threats in the FBI would know it could include the possibility of exposure to the community (snitch jacketing), which to me would mean certain death considering the people Richard was hanging out with. I read this entry as the point where the agency was threatening him, the point where he could do the unthinkable. I had been in denial, thinking that Richard must have done some minor duties for the FBI, but would never have betrayed his comrades in the Black Panthers. He was courageous, always a risk-taker. He once told me he was working on a plan to break into George F. Cake Co, a police supply outfit that provided weapons and technology for police departments throughout California. His scheme was to steal weapons for the Panthers. But there is no risk I can think of equal to that taken by someone who is simultaneously a field marshal in the Black Panther Party and an FBI informant. In June of 2015 Rosenfeld finally received updated FBI files including reports written by Richard (perhaps under his code name “Richard Ford”) previously withheld by the FBI. These reports that could only have been written by him; no one else had such information or knowledge of the BPP or had friendships with Newton and Seale from 1963 on and familiarity with the original issues leading up to the 10 Point Program of the Black Panther Party. In these files there is a thorough, objective description of the formation of the BPP, a full report on Huey P. Newton and a warts-and-all biography of Bobby Seale. Richard gave details like arrest records, his receiving welfare payments, and the separation of Bobby from his first wife. Richard informed on the two men who founded the Panthers. The dates he typed on the reports were Nov. 16 and 30 showing compliance with the deadline of Nov. 24, 1967. I immediately wrote an email to Seth Rosenfeld admitting he was right. I had to read the reports myself to believe it, but yes, Richard had betrayed his comrades. Then I recalled the list Richard and I worked on together, the one he left behind with me. How many other lists might there be? He was intelligent, though I don’t think he had a photographic memory. But had I also given names that he may have used to confirm other information he had? I don’t know if Richard knew then about Cointelpro, the FBI plan to disrupt or destroy radical organizations, but the FBI used information on Bobby Seale’s marriage to harm him and his family. Richard had done damage. I recall the day in December 1968 when Richard dropped by my flat excited to talk about the upcoming Third World Liberation Front Strike at Cal Berkeley. We talked for a minute and then he said, “I meant to come by earlier, but there was another car parked in front of the garage, and I didn’t know whether it would be…right.” “Well I , I ,” I stammered, “there is something I have to tell you, Richard. I’m seeing someone, Dennis is living with me now. He’s kind and he loves the kids.” “I guess it was bound to happen. I should have come around more, but I need to work on campus to make a Third World College. We’ll have a strike next month.” “You didn’t do anything wrong, Richie. You told me from the beginning that politics would always come first. I still want you to be my friend.” We embraced and he left, but I felt so sneaky, as if I had betrayed him.

Cecile Lusby                                                                                       2182 words

Though Your Dreams be Tossed and Blown

‘Old songs are the little houses our hearts once lived in.”   Ben Hecht

       Stories have shaped the minds and hearts of children from the beginnings of humankind. They first bring enchantment, and then teach. My moral life developed as I listened to my mother read bedtime stories to me, and then to the plays and mysteries and songs on the radio. I later went to movies in the days before the ascendancy of television (1946-1955). Unique among the arts, the movie musical combines a visual story with the lyrics and melody of its songs. Of all the musicals I saw as a child I remember the animation of Song of the South and Dumbo, in 1951 the musical Show Boat, and ten years later, Carousel. Younger readers can view the movies on Netflix or check the songs on Youtube to experience the same films discussed here.

      The first movie musical I recall seeing was Song of the South, but I don’t remember

much. When I heard that Disney had stopped distributing the film for its lack of political correctness and historical accuracy, my mind was flooded with visions of my mother and me as we tacked up the movie poster singing Zip-a-dee doo dah. I fell asleep next to that poster every night when I was five years old. My mother, newly divorced, talked about how Uncle Remus told stories to make us all happy and taught us to look on the bright side. The movie’s grandfather hired Uncle Remus to try to cheer little Johnny and his mother after his father had left the family, the exact situation I was in.

     Dumbo is a tiny baby elephant with outsized ears whose mother loves him just the way he is. When the other big elephants in the circus tease him, his mother runs amok and is promptly locked up in a cage with a sign saying “Mad Elephant”. The circus separates the mother and baby until my favorite scene when a little mouse brings Dumbo to her and she reaches her trunk through the bars of her cell to caress her baby, tenderly lift him up, and rock him to the lullaby ‘Baby Mine’.  That scene made me feel the violation of his mother’s imprisonment and the beauty of her love her baby, no matter what minor flaws he might have. I loved how Dumbo’s large ears brought him the magical gift of flying. It was a lesson to us not to judge by appearances.

     I did not see Dumbo until I had had my strabismus first surgery, after four years of wearing a patch over my good right eye. The surgery failed to straighten my left eye, but at least I didn’t have to wear a patch.. At times children mocked my cross-eyed appearance, so when I saw Dumbo, it was as someone who had already lived with teasing for being a little different.

      As I grew older I looked for more serious movies and so in 1951 I went to see Showboat, an adaptation of Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel. The history of race in America is a complex one, and at nine years of age, this was my first movie dealing with the topic. I found a quarter under my bed, the price of a child’s ticket then, and walked to the Theater with my neighbors. I was drawn to the panorama of people on the river, in the fields, and on deck. While most of the musical concerned the 1890s love story of Magnolia and Gaylord Ravenal,  the major part was that of Ava Gardner, a gypsy goddess, playing the major role of Julie Laverne, lead actress on the Cotton Blossom.  As she dances and talks, her beauty pulled me into her story and I was transfixed. I felt concern for most of the characters, but mostly for Julie. Early in the film the Sheriff comes on board looking for the actress, and the upbeat mood changes to dread. He announces that he has received information that Julie’s mother was ‘negro’. The news shocked me since Julie in the film (Ava Gardner) looks like a white person with a tan, so I was confused until the lawman speaks of her white husband, Steve, and uses the word miscegenation, giving the explanation that the marriage was against the law in those parts. Steve quickly pricks Julie’s hand, putting her wounded finger to his lips to mix her blood with his, following the old rule that just one drop of African blood makes you  ‘Negro.’   As Steve tries to be a little bit black to stay with his wife, my nine-year-old mind said, “Yes! We have a solution!”

       When the Sheriff refuses to accept them as lawfully married people, Steve and Julie have to leave the boat or risk being arrested. As Julie Laverne, green-eyed and gorgeous, walks down the plank and off the boat a half hour into the movie, my world changed and I wept there in my seat. Seeing her stranded, exiled on the shore as the steamboat moves down the Mississippi transformed me. I thought there would be a happy ending for her, just as there was in Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Secret Garden, and Snow White. Why should she be punished and set apart?  Why had the rules changed?  As the camera pulls away I saw Julie and Steve move off screen. At just that point William Warfield begins to sing  ‘Old Man River’ and the song underscores the loss. The audience wonders about her fate.

There’s an old man called the Mississippi

There’s an old man that I long to see

What does he care if the world’s got troubles?

What does he care if the land ain’t free?

       Here are all the elements of dissonance in a song: Jerome Kern’s music and Oscar Hammerstein’s words. The heart rises with the melody, but the river metaphor tells us people suffer, there is inequity, and the world is indifferent. I sat still waiting for Julie’s return.

       Little by little the singers and dancers reveal their universe to us off stage and on. As I sat in the dark comfort of the cool theater, I learned about Gaylord Ravenal’s gambling and Magnolia surviving Gaylord’s desertion.  But Julie’s absence deepened my curiosity. When I saw her later alone and drinking, I felt tenderness for her and sensed the burden of her secrets and losses.  What would happen to my heroine?

     Seeing the Technicolor beauty of Showboat and hearing the songs created a feeling of happiness in me from the first frame, but gradually the heavy plot changed my feelings. The movie ends with Julie in the shadows of the dock waving at the riverboat, unseen by her friends onboard.  Showboat taught me to care about the people left behind.  The lesson I took from the film was to love Julie, not to judge her. I judged the Sheriff and the old law he served.

       In 1956 I took myself to see the afternoon showing of Carousel using my babysitting money. I paid fifty cents admission when I was fourteen, but years earlier I had listened to the abbreviated radio version by the Theater Guild. Rogers and Hammerstein used the storyline from a play by Ferenc Molnar, Liliom to make this ‘all American musical’. As the movie opens the orchestrated calliope pumps out the opening waltz with dizzying changes, the audience travels back in time to a day at the fair. Carrie chats about Mr. Snow, her intended, as she and Julie Jordan walk together. The comparison of Carrie and Julie reflects the contrast between domesticity and desire. Sexual yearning exists in both males and females, but Carrie wants a husband; Julie yearns for a mate.

      Julie persuades Carrie to go away so she can talk to the barker, Billy Bigelow. In the movie this young man is not so young, in fact he seems a little seedy in his rumpled checkered pants. Still we notice he is very muscular and masculine.  Julie looks lovely in a costume resembling the ‘little Lanz dress’ with its buttoned up, fitted bodice and flared skirt so popular in the 1950s.  Most girls can identify with Julie Jordan, the ingénue portrayed by the young Shirley Jones. Yet here in the very first scenes something is off, something is wrong with Billy Bigelow that we can see, and Julie cannot.

       She starts to sing in a light voice a rising melody setting a new and hopeful mood. As Billy speaks he appears skeptical and tough, but right away I caught glimpses of the mysterious qualities Julie sees. She is feminine and gentle, a little too trusting.  Billy is older, worldlier, saying we are all just specks on a little planet in a larger universe.

            On a night like this I start to wonder

What life is all about…

The sky’s so big the sea looks small.

And two little people, you and I,

We don’t count at all.

        Hard words, but when Julie begins singing, she is all bright faith. Where Billy is rash and rough, Julie sees blossoms falling and wants to believe. The movie was my first memory of a story showing the attraction of opposites. So begins the great duet of Carousel, If I Loved You. As the song progresses, one speaks and the other listens. They don’t sing together, they don’t harmonize their parts; each is tentative, wondering whether to lead or to follow, to go on as separate individuals or try being a couple. In this way they extend that moment of uncertainty, ambivalence, and hesitation, but that hesitation is brief and the story continues.

If I loved you

Words wouldn’t come in an easy way

Round in circles I’d go

Longing to tell you, but afraid and shy

I’d let my golden chances pass me by.

      This song expresses the dilemma of whether an individual should explore his/her own potential or become part of a larger community.  Are we tiny motes in a cold night sky or unique persons acting within the force of nature?  Each phrase is tentative, the melody rises as our voices do when we question.  They both consider the risk of embarrassment if their feelings are not returned or the chance of losing love by not speaking out.  If silence is a risk, so is expression.

Off you would go

In the mist of day

Never ever to know

How I loved you

If I loved you

    Billy and Julie meet and marry; Julie gets pregnant just as Billy loses his job. He dies while taking part in a robbery. The entire relationship takes place within two months. The play leaves Julie to face motherhood as a widow alone in the world with no money. This bleak story line is what Molnar, a Hungarian Jew who came to American fleeing Hitler, contributed. The glowing optimism that dominates this musical is the work of Rogers and Hammerstein.

       The films skips ahead fifteen years when Heaven lets Billy visit earth for one day to see his little girl, Louise being teased by other children for being the daughter of a thief.  The village doctor speaks at her graduation and tells the youngsters not to be held back by the success or failings of their parents, but to stand on their own and try to be happy.

      Earlier in the film Billy slaps Julie, but she later claims she didn’t feel it. I was shocked at this false note.  Similarly I did not agree with the message in  ‘What’s The Use of Wonderin’’ because it was too traditional in its view of marriage being inevitable, and its success depending on the long-suffering wife.  

When he wants your kisses, you will give them to the lad. 

And anywhere he leads you, you will walk,

And if he says he needs you, you’ll go running there like mad

He’s your fella and you love him

And all the rest is talk.

     Those minor quibbles aside, I love the movie. It shows a cycle of life where young women, who often pick the wrong mate, carry on to raise their children. Carousel lets us know that love involves risk and teaches us to keep on trying even if our plans fail. The dynamic tension in Carousel’s opening scenes compares a solitary life with the shared life of a couple. Julie Jordan hears rumors and doubts them, hesitates, but takes the risk to love while she is very young, and then finds the courage to go on alone after Billy dies.

      The songs in these Hollywood musicals teach us about life and death, love and tolerance. It is the feeling in songs that these movies convey so well, not just costumes or plot lines. These four movies: Song of the South, Dumbo, Showboat, and Carousel celebrate life while acknowledging its losses and sadness.  The courage of the characters left me wanting to change what evil I saw in the world, and led me to care about others no matter their differences.

    

    

Richard For Real

Cecile Lusby                                                                                          2638

 words

                                                                                            

Richard For Real

       Can any one story explain a man who lived two lives? Seth Rosenfeld’s book, Subversives revealed in 2012 that Richard Aoki, famous as the first Japanese-American to join the Black Panther Party and well-known leader of the Asian American Political Alliance during the Third World Liberation Strike at UC Berkeley of 1969, was an FBI informant. I have struggled to discover the truth and am still unwilling to believe that the man I knew would ever do anything to betray his comrades in the Black Panthers, but the evidence gathered in Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power, does reveal years of his working for the agency through the Socialist Workers Party, the 1964 Vietnam Day Committee, and the 1969 Third World Liberation strike at UCB. His record as a source can be tracked from 1961 – 1977, but I did not find any evidence of his reporting on the Black Panthers.

      So I try to search out my memories and compare them to the revelations of this year. A friend of more than forty years, Richard was my boyfriend in 1967-1968 when we were both in our twenties. When I first read the section on him in Subversives’, I was heartbroken. Initially I didn’t believe any of it, and then the FBI records were posted online with most information whited out and censored. I read Diane Fujino’s more flattering biography of Richard, Samurai Among Panthers in which she mentions his FBI file as a matter of course, as if he had been a suspect being watched all along, not an insider. Richard told me in 1967 that the FBI was following him, so I spent weeks reading and did glean something concrete from these books, but it is impossible to get anything coherent from his redacted FBI file. How can we have a reasonable consideration of facts and documentation in the face of so much secrecy.  Still his friends and students’ stand up for Richard’s character.

    Recent disclosures about his work with the FBI three years after his death in 2009 have been hard for his contemporaries, his students, and for me to accept. During my time with Richard I had been a liberal trying in vain to be a radical, but he was a Maoist revolutionary. Our arguments over political goals and tactics made me realize we could never be together permanently. (1).  He had no sense of caution, particularly not as far as my children were concerned. He told me he had chosen not have children, since they might be taken hostage and he would never compromise his principles.  I took him at his word. I knew my children came first for me while Richard was a bachelor for life.

    I have read that during the TWLF strike he slapped Richard Rodriguez around while four black associates looked on.  On the face of it, the assault was at cross-purposes with the strike’s goals to create a Third World Department, later known as the Ethnic Studies.  There were short tempers and tall stories, divisive rhetoric and exaggeration on all sides, and the Black Panthers were no exception. I suspect now that Richard was doing things so he could be arrested, and I disagree with accusations that he was an agent provocateur whose antics got others arrested. Most of his four arrests were during this strike. I believe that in many cases Richard, the ‘informant’, when he reported, reported primarily on himself and his own activities.

      I met Richard through mutual friends in autumn of 1966, when he was preparing to leave SWP over what he told me was its disregard of the Black liberation movement in the USA. I found him both courageous and conscientious in taking on the struggle of black people as his own. This declaration was his personal position as I first got to know him and I will always believe Richard was sincere in his dedication to the fight for civil rights that led him to the Black Panthers.

      My guess about his FBI history is this: Richard as a teenager needed money. He was living with his mother who supported her two sons on $1.25 an hour in 1957; he had already finished his basic training, so would have needed to avoid a blot on his army record after being caught talking to ‘known communists’ on Threadgill’s wiretap. This was in my estimation the rough beginning of his work with the agency, with a paper trail leading to formal entry as a source for the FBI in 1961. Richard rejected the Communist Party early on over its failure to protest the injustice of exiling Japanese Americans to internment camps in WWII, so he studied the Trotskyist history of the Socialist Workers Party even while he informed on them. The friendship between Richard, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seale while they were students at Merritt College 1964-1966 radicalized them all.

        I believe Richard experienced a conversion or a change of heart from a conventional patriotic American to a committed Socialist or Maoist toward the end of his time in the Socialist Workers Party while still in the employ of the FBI. I would guess 1966 as the year as he wrote and presented a paper to the SWP supporting the African American struggle for self-defense, when most civil rights groups still believed in non-violence. He let the FBI know he had resigned from SWP on May 1, 1967 according to Fujino’s notes, and amazingly he let the agency know he was a member of the Black Panther Party on the same day according to Rosenfeld’s endnotes.

    When I looked at Richard’s FBI file online, I quickly saw there was nothing to see on most pages, so I looked at the dates from the years when I was with him (1967-1968) and tried to match up events I remembered to those dates. In a November 1967 entry there was a cluster of initials next to a dated reference to an incident earlier that May. There was a request for a report from him in May, repeated in July, put off again until September, and then a terse demand for a meeting on November 1, with a final extension to November 24. It was pretty clear from the sequence of dates without a reply that the FBI was not getting what it wanted from him.

     November 24 was significant to me because the day before it was Thanksgiving, when Richard showed up in full Panther uniform under the influence to pick me up at my father’s house. He was simply crazy that night, November 23, barking orders, demanding that I gather my things and get the children in his car if I wanted a ride home. I rushed outside to avoid further embarrassment and Richard drove from Richmond to Berkeley like a madman, bumping into two cars along the way. I would not have called him an alcoholic then, just a man who drove while drinking on more than one occasion. When I got home, I rushed my children inside the house, locked the door, and did not speak to him again for weeks. The FBI’s long postponed November 24 deadline would have been the next morning.  I am now certain that his unusual behavior was due to this looming deadline, his unwillingness to inform on the Panthers, and the weight of his resistance bearing down on him the night before the report was due. In other parts of the FBI file there is the statement that Richard revealed on May 1 that he had joined the BPP, but would not disclose anything about anyone but himself and then later avoided the BPP meetings so that he would not have to do even that.

     I recall him as my friend, but a friend I didn’t always understand. I do know Richard’s Maoist convictions isolated him, but he put his shoulder to the wheel when other academics and politicos just talked.  If he informed to the FBI, let someone step forward and cite one consequence of it. He stayed in the Socialist Workers Party for more than five years until he was convinced they did nothing besides studying, talking, and publishing their paper, The Militant. Richard loved to talk about the Left and all of its organizations. And in Berkeley, as they say, every little meaning had a movement all its own. Richard had an encyclopedic memory and could have written a treatise on any or all of these groups and could talk like an expert for hours on beliefs and history of the Left, as he often did at my kitchen table. This chatting is why he was considered a valuable source, an expert for background information.

     Before 1968 the online files show the FBI reprimanded Richard for not reporting in a timely way. Possibly he behaved in a rash manner during the TWLF strike to create a stir, something he could later report to the Agency. Richard cut off his ties to the FBI officially in 1977, saying that his association was at odds with his professional and ethical obligations as a counselor, but there were long periods in that file with no entries.

     That just about brings the story full circle, except for the fact of a childhood spent running the streets with black kids in West Oakland, except for growing up surrounded by African-Americans and joining a street gang, witnessing another world outside the mainstream. Then Richard met Burney Threadgill in 1957, and suddenly there was a chance to make something of himself. Was it opportunism at first or was he intimidated by being caught on tape? Was he really free to refuse to inform? Was he trying to follow in the mysterious footsteps of his father, a man full of contradictions, outraged at the internment, but who taught civics at the Topaz camp in Utah?

      Momo Chang’s December 5, 2012 article in the Eastbay Express also argues that Richard was at first an apolitical kid interested in a career in the armed services. Richard can be tracked as working for the FBI as early as 1961 until he stopped cooperating or reporting in 1967. When talking to his comrades in the Black Panther Party, Richard referred to his studies at UC Berkeley as a pressing obligation to excuse himself from attending meetings.  In her article in the Eastbay Express Momo quoted a statement by Bobby Seale that corresponds to my memories of Richard in 1967-68:

    What we do know is that sometime in late 1967 or 1968, Richard distanced himself from the Panthers at a time when the group was reaching the pinnacle of its popularity and influence. According to Seale, Aoki pulled back from the Panthers in order to remain a student at UC Berkeley. “He says, ‘I can’t operate with you guys right now. Just leave me alone right now…. I’ll get back to you.  They keep harassing my ass and threatening me,” Seale said at a recent community meeting, recalling what Aoki told him at the time. “I didn’t see Richard anymore. You know the next time I saw Richard was when I came out of jail (in 1972).”

    This quote brings back my memory of Richard trembling at the back door on the night after the shootout wounding Huey Newton and killing Officer Frey in October 1967. “I don’t know what will happen now,” he said “I’ve gotta lay low.”  In all the time I knew Richard, I cannot imagine him rushing over to the San Francisco office of the FBI to report on Huey Newton or the BPP. He told me then the FBI was after him, causing him to use the phone at my house, fearing his own was tapped. Bobby Seale’s testimony reassures me that Richard stopped doing anything with the Panthers by early 1968, and I suspect it was because he refused to discuss anything about them to the FBI. Seale’s words further underscore my story of his erratic behavior on Thanksgiving, 1967 and my current belief that he had reached the breaking point just before the decision not to deliver the November 24 report.

     What emerges is an amazing American story of the transformation of a young man who had entered the military as a teenager, completing six months active duty before he was nineteen, one who had managed to have his record as a juvenile offender erased in a deal with the courts in exchange for enlisting in the US Army Active Reserves program.  When Threadgill picked up his voice on a wiretap talking to a fifteen-year-old Doug Wachter, the son of known communists, that connection, once exposed would have ended Richard’s military career. I maintain that this tape explained his compliance with Threadgill from 1957 to 1961. Burney suggested to Richard that if he had no interest in the Communist Party, he could help by going to their meetings and reporting back.

      By 1966 Richard had changed his core beliefs through study, through identification with the Black Liberation movement, and his opposition to the Vietnam War.  He joined the Black Panthers, but a year later retreated to finish his studies at UC Berkeley, participating in both the TWLF and AAPA. It is also clear that he continued with the Agency, reporting on his own activities during the strike, including hitting Richard Rodriguez. Hundreds of thousands of words have been published (48 pages on Google by January, 2013) in the wake of Seth Rosenfeld’s book, most denying that Richard could have worked for the FBI. His friends and students cannot believe it, but I do. I understand the change in him as a progression based on his studies, a point of view that has to be seen as his evolution from conservative to revolutionary, a remarkable outcome based on an education set up and paid for by FBI agent Burney Threadgill.

       The crucial fact is that when Richard joined the Army he was a ‘warts and all’ patriot, ready to serve his country in spite of its faults, namely our historic legacy of racism. Like me, Richard had actually lived in the ghetto. I had a relatively brief two years in San Francisco, but Richard’s earliest memories were of the concentration camp at Topaz, Utah and from 1945-1956 of West Oakland. I believe this lived experience was the factor shaping his political development as a radical.

      It is an amazing trajectory that placed Richard as an early plant for the FBI in the CP and the SWP from 1957 to 1966. He left the SWP at the point when he joined the Panthers in fall 1966 and then, after a crisis of conscience, made a strategic exit from the BPP late in 1967 or early 1968. He worked during TWLF Strike until his graduation from UC Berkeley 1971, probably making less and less frequent reports to the FBI until the mid-1970s.

     I will remember Richard as a friend and a soldier in the only battle that mattered to me in the 1960s and in my entire life. The same hands that slapped Richard Rodriguez around also showed my son how to tie his shoes. As one who met him in 1966 as he moved away from the SWP into the fiery fight for equal rights for African Americans, I knew him as he took on that struggle as his own, and I write as a witness.

1. Richard never admitted any doubts about Chairman Mao. Two books recently published on the Great Famine in China 1958-1962 show how Mao’s policy of forcing peasants to build backyard furnaces to produce steel instead of farming led directly to the famine and starvation of 30 million Chinese. But it was Richard, the believer, who first showed Huey and Bobby the Little Red Book.

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.