As the campus prepared to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Northwestern students, faculty and community members honored the efforts of another civil rights activist at the film screening of “AOKI” in Kresge Hall Friday.
The documentary, featured as part of a film series for the Asian American Studies Program’s 10th anniversary, chronicles the life of Richard Aoki, a third-generation
Japanese American who had a profound influence in the Black Panther Party and the Third World Liberation Front.
The film provided in-depth coverage of the power movements of the 1960s, said James Zarsadiaz, a second-year doctorate student in history and Asian American studies.
“It really shows how complex the movement was,” he said. “It highlights those bridges that were made that often times are not shown a lot throughout scholarship.”
The film presents a mixture of interviews with members of the Black Panther Party, including Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Third World Liberation Front strikers, excerpts from Aoki’s speeches, rare photographs and commentary from Aoki’s comrades involved in the Civil Rights Movement. In exclusive interviews, Aoki expresses his reaction to the efforts of minorities in the ’60s and ’70s, and his radical actions during the strike at the University of California-Berkeley’s campus. The film also provides significant insight on Aoki’s concealed role in the formation and plight of the Black Panther Party.
Completed last year, “AOKI” has been screened only once before in Oakland, Calif., Aoki’s hometown. Through the efforts of Gregory Jue, the Asian American Studies Program assistant, the organization obtained special rights to screen the movie at NU.
Jue, who worked with Aoki during the Third World Liberation Force strike in 1969 on UC-Berkeley’s campus and was later involved in the Asian American Movement, directed a brief discussion of the documentary and its implications on understanding minority struggles in the US after the screening.
“I actually like the way that this film connected with students today because it tells an important history of the ’60s and ’70s that people today actually don’t realize,” he said.
“They don’t realize the seriousness in which people took it up, the dangers that they faced, and the commitment of people like Richard Aoki.”
Arianna Hermosillo said she went to the event to learn how Aoki worked with others to found the Black Panther Party.
“I attended the event because of the initial shock that there was a Japanese-American founding member of the Black Panther Party,” the Medill senior said. “We all kind of limit the way we look at it, the Black Panther Party only for people in the black community fighting oppression.”
The screening, co-sponsored by the African American Studies program, will be followed by “A Village Called Versailles,” “Vincent Who?” and “The Grandpa from Brazil,” which will be co-sponsored with the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the
Asian and Middle East Studies Program. All of the films are recent documentaries focused on Asian-American history, with emphasis on cross-racial events, said Jinah Kim, assistant director of the Asian American Studies Program.
“On one level we are all really committed to the same studies, the study of race and power, just from different locations,” Kim said. “This documentary really exemplifies that kind of intellectual curiosity and the desire to really work with each other to strengthen our fields respectively.”[email protected]
