Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life

The Old Left, Third World Radicalism, and Vietnam

THE OLD LEFT, THIRD WORLD RADICALISM, AND VIETNAM The Socialist Workers Party and Black Liberation Aoki is best known for his work in the Black Panther Party and Third World Liberation Front. Yet, I contend that his participation in the predominantly White Old Left, through the SWP/YSA, was pivotal not only to his radicalization but paradoxically in moving him toward Black nationalism as well. In the early s, at a time when Aoki was deciding whether to join the YSA and SWP, the Militant, the SWP’s weekly newspaper, was filled with articles on Black radicals as leaders of the SWP, YSA, and the Cuba solidarity movement; on the all-Black Freedom Now Party; and on the radicalization of the “Negro struggle,” as it was then called. By contrast to the mainstream press’s vilification of the Nation of Islam as an “anti-white, anti-integration, anti-Christian cult,”59 the SWP strongly denounced the racist treatment of the Black Muslims. After Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam, the Militant gave extensive coverage to his evolving political ideas. The Militant also gave strong support to Robert F. Williams as he fled to Cuba to escape the Monroe kidnapping charge. Aoki, listening to a tape-recorded speech by Robert Williams at a Berkeley YSA meeting in November , would have been impressed with Williams’s message that “the Cuban revolution meant a new life for the Negro people as under Castro all discrimination had been eliminated.”60 Most historiographies date the emergence of Black Power to the assassination of Malcolm X in February , Stokely Carmichael’s popularization of the Black Power slogan in June , and/or the formation of the BPP in October .61 But in the early s, the Militant recorded a “new mood” in the Black community that was bubbling up, becoming impatient with the gradualism and integrationism of the Civil Rights Movement. This historic political climate was crucial to the development of Aoki’s radical ideology, as he read the pages of the Militant. SWP leader George Breitman exclaimed that “the best article of ” was Julian Mayfield’s essay “The Challenge to Negro Leadership: The Case of Robert Williams,” which told the story of Black self-defense against Klan violence in Monroe, North Carolina.62 To Breitman, Mayfield’s article was important because it captured the “current moods and trends in the Negro movement,” showing how “the emergence of a new young leadership offer[ed] a serious challenge to the middle-class legalistic and pacific spokesmen in the struggle for Negro equality.”63  “My Identification Went with the Aspirations of the Masses” The new Negro struggle was critical of the Kennedy administration’s “failure to take a firm civil rights stand” as well as being “sorely disappointed” with the top civil rights leadership.64 In contrast with the popular appeal of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the  March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Militant claimed that “the best speech . . . was never heard.”65 The New York Times reported that after a religious leader threatened to withdraw, march organizers asked John Lewis, chair of SNCC, to revise his speech because it was “not consistent with the tenor” of the program .66 The Militant was more to the point: Lewis’s speech was censored because of his “blunt criticism of Kennedy and the Democratic Party.”67 The Militant, as well as Malcolm X, asserted that the Kennedy administration, in order to control the march, gave power to the so-called Big Six civil rights leaders by providing money and media outlets, and by projecting them as the key march organizers.68 In his original speech, published in the Militant, Lewis criticized the federal government in unambiguous terms: “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of. . . . In good conscience, we cannot support the [Kennedy] administration’s civil rights bill, for it is too little and too late. There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality. . . . The nonviolent revolution is saying, ‘We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department , nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure that could and would assure us a victory.’”69 Lewis also voiced the “new...