A place for down-to-earth education during the late '30s here in Honolulu was Aala Park. As I walked home from the docks where I worked to the street car stop, there were many evenings when voices of labor organizers and politicians came booming over the loudspeaker from the Aala Park bandstand. I was drawn to the gathering and I listened to what the speakers said.
I began looking forward to these rallies where men with courage stood up and exposed the monopoly-controlled system in the Territory. The audience was comprised almost entirely of workers. The speakers were down-to-earth and it was not, difficult to follow what they said. But to understand all they said was another matter.
After I had completed two years and a half at the University of Hawaii and again returned to stevedoring, I found many contradictions between what I had heard In classroom lectures and what I heard from speakers at Aala Park. At the rallies, the speakers were pro-labor or workers themselves. At the university, a liberal professor was exceptional. Some lecturers tried to put on a front that they were not prejudiced against laborers and that they were "fair."
Pro-labor speakers at Aala Park like Willie Grozier and his brother Clarence, awakened and raised the social understanding of those who listened to them. I recall that when Willie Crozier left the Democratic Party because, he said, it was controlled by Republicans and the Big Five, he spoke frequently at Aala Park on the Independent Non-Partisan Party platform. This took place during 1936 and 1938. His exposure and blasting of the vested interests here sowed seeds for thought throughout the Territory. One of the main planks of the party was the right to collective bargaining, more or less accepted by big Hawaiian employers today but booted around by them in the middle and late thirties.
Lectures Did Not Have Contact With Reality
At the university a professor in elementary economics used to say that labor had the right to collective bargaining; however, he almost always had his "but . . ." Another remark we students heard was that if only laborers and their leaders were "responsible."
Such qualifications were not applied to employers or their conduct. I do not know how many students readily fell for this prejudiced line, but repetitions of such remarks undoubtedly left impressions. Most of the students came from working class families on the plantations, in towns and in Honolulu, but the professor lectured to them as though laborers who were trying to organize were a different type of workers from the students' parents. Here again. I do not know how many students felt they were disassociated from the working class. But I recall that students did not question anti-labor remarks in classrooms, remarks which actually criticized or ridiculed their own social class.
How Big Interests Control Thinking In Classrooms
I heard of the "Bloody Monday" shooting of laborers and their supporters at the Hilo docks in 1938 from speakers at Aala Park. The Big Island policemen were used by the big interests to shoot demonstrators who protested the scab-manned Waialeale. We could and should have drawn lessons from this incident in the university classrooms. But I did not hear a single instructor or professor remark about this in classroom. In private, one of them discussed it with me and I was grateful to him then for giving me a deeper understanding of the strike situation. I believe there were others among the faculty members who felt outraged at the "Bloody Monday" shooting where more than 50 were wounded, but they carefully avoided comment to their classes in order to keep their jobs.
The control of the university by Hawaii's vested interests is such that independent-minded, open and courageous faculty members have no guarantee of continued employment. Teachers who make students think become unpopular with the board of regents. Thus, the instructor who taught me freshman English was released. In like manner a man like Dr. John Reinecke, who 'took great interest in the fledgling labor movement and who refused to be thought-controlled, could not obtain continued tenure at the Manoa campus.
Reineckes Had Deep Sympathy for Workers
I came to know Mrs. Aiko Reinecke in an American literature class. I found that the Reineckes had deep sympathy for the workers and their struggle to better their livelihood.
When I received the YMCA scholarship to study in Georgia shortly after I came to know them, I wished that I had met them sooner. I felt that perhaps they could have helped me to understand the various questions that came into my mind, pertaining to depression, war, unemployment, land monopoly that the Crozier brothers had frequently blasted at their Aala Park appearances; labor organizations, classes in society and social and economic discrimination.
What are the answers and the solutions to these ills in society? The motivations of human conduct? Like a jig-saw puzzle, scattered bits of information filled my mind. I could not piece them together into a consistent whole. I could not understand the whole panorama of social life, with all its struggles and uneven development. I could not understand why things happened as they did or why people behaved as they did.
Brutal Reality of Racial Segregation
In September 1940, I arrived on the West Coast and sped southward from Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus. Its tires sang on the highway as we passed green fruit orchards and farms that stretched for acres and acres and mile after mile.
In a few days we were passing through Texas. A commotion the back of the bus made us all turn around. Slumped in a seat was an attractive young Negro lady, unconscious and supported by a Negro man sitting beside her.
A white lady in front of me said something like: "She's probably starved!"
I looked back again. I saw the color-line sharply drawn. There in the back were Negroes, segregated by a flexible line. When numerous white passengers came on, the bus driver made them crowd toward the rear and the line of demarcation moved backward. When white passengers were few, the crowded Negroes eased into seats left vacant in the rear section. But if the vacant seats were up front, they remained in the crowded area. The bus driver did not ask the white passengers to move forward to fill in vacancies so that the Negro passengers who were either standing or sitting in the uncomfortable aisle seats could occupy the more comfortable ones.
Why Was I With the Whites?
I tried to recall where on this trip I had first seen the "For White Only" signs. Why did I go into the lavatories marked White Only"? Why was I riding up forward in the bus with white passengers? I was not white but colored, and according to common classification, "yellow." I was deeply tanned from stevedoring under the Hawaiian sun but no one questioned my sitting up front. Nevertheless, I began to feel uncomfortable.
At bus stops the Negro passengers travelling long distances had difficulty buying food. They had to go to the side door of the kitchen. But since serving white passengers kept the kitchen workers busy, the Negroes were often ignored.
Ugly Form of White Supremacy
The kitchen help were Negroes. They helped prepare the food. But the food ithey prepared in the kitchen was served by white waiters and waitresses in "For White Only" restaurants.
This made me think of Kahala and the restricted upper Nuuanu residential districts in Honolulu where the white people kept non-whites from buying property. But as in the southern restaurants that did not serve Negroes but employed them for services, the white residents of Honolulu's "For White Only" districts employed Oriental yard boys and maids and cooks. In both instances, white supremacy showed itself in its ugly form.
Because of my background—a non-white who had worked withhis hands as a laborer all along, I felt that I was much closer to the Negroes than the whites. There were so many things in common in the struggles of the non-white people.
Human Beings Forced To Buy Food In Beggar-like Manner
When the Negro lady who had fainted became conscious, she started crying. She was hungry and nauseated.
When the bus stopped, I brought her a few oranges, sandwiches and a bottle of milk. A white couple also brought oranges to her.
At the next bus stop I started a conversation with the white couple because I was curious to know why they were thoughtful and why they were unlike the others. They told me they were from San Francisco, going to New Orleans for a trip. They were not southerners who accepted segregation as "proper social behavior" every hour of the day.
The lady seemed more understanding. She presumed that the Negro lady who had fainted had been reared in the North. Her pride and dignity made her go hungry rather than buy food in a begging manner at the kitchen door. And the white lady commented: "Thank God she was reared in the North."
Discrimination Hits Negroes, Orientals
Her husband asked me if I were Chinese. I answered I was a Japanese-American from Hawaii.
He said there were many like me in California. When I asked him about anti-Oriental discrimination in California, he said it was not too bad.
His wife seemed annoyed at his statement and she told me that Orientals on the West Coast are somewhat like Negroes in the South and Jews in the eastern states. We shouldn't have) discrimination in our country, she remarked, but we have it just the same.
My Past Mirrored In the Present
We were ready to go and I sank into my seat on the bus. But even as night closed in on us, sleep would not come to me. I was going through new experiences. As I thought of the day's happenings, the past came rushing back to my mind. Some of the pieces of my jig-saw puzzle began fitting into each other. A pattern began forming and the inter-relationship of the pieces began to take shape.
Liberation of Negro Slaves Freed Contract Laborers
Way back in grade school at Napoopoo, a Hawaiian teacher had taught us about the youngster in Kentucky who split logs, read by the light of kindling firewood, became President of the United States, and freed the Negro slaves. We had sung "My Old Kentucky Home" at the top of our voices, each trying to outdo the others. We had drawn log cabins and his long, bearded face with color crayons. Lincoln was not only of Kentucky, but of all America.
The legal abolition of Negro slavery had influenced the treatment of Asiatic immigrant laborers like my parents. When the United States made the Hawaiian Islands her territory, she had abolished feudal bondage of Asiatic contract laborers, and thus my people were freed.
Constitutional Rights Must Be Implemented
The Negroes had won equal rights and privileges on paper through constitutional amendments, but legal guarantees were insufficient. They still have to fight every inch of their way to implement those guarantees and make them realities in everyday life. Could they do it alone? How many of the other non-whites would join with them? How strong were the forward-looking whites who would fight with them and for them to make democracy work for all?
I thought of my father and what he used to say. He told us that the Negroes and the Jews will be oppressed as long as they do not have a strong nation to look after them. He said as long as Japan is strong, we would be treated decently in America. This was a feeling shared by many of the older generation years before the last war.
Imperialist Japan's Superior Attitude In Asia
The Japanese government opposed the U. S. exclusion act as discrimination against the Japanese people. Japan successfully interceded when California cities segregated students of Japanese ancestry from public schools where white students attended. Such acts made the Japanese residents believe that Japan opposed segregation and discrimination.
But in Korea the people had been subjugated by the Japanese government. In Manchuria the Japanese warlords and financiers were doing the same. And in China, cities were wantonly bombed! by Japanese aircraft. Chinese women were being raped by Japanese soldiers at Nanking and other places. The Chinese were treated as an inferior people. And to make it seem as though the Chinese were a great threat, the Japanese government was conducting mock air-raid drills in Japan and whipping up war hysteria within the nation. Secret police and thought-control police abounded in such an environment. Thought control laws were enforced long before 1930.
Father's Way Was Not the Answer
A strong Japan such as father had envisioned was not the answer to the elimination of discrimination and exploitation of people by people. A Jewish nation or a Negro nation established on the principles and programs of warring Japan would not improve human relationship.
What would do it? I knew then that I would never be satisfied until I found the answers to this and other burning questions that stayed in my mind constantly.