Overshadowed

Although generally not included in newspaper accounts or history books, a number of Asian Americans were heavily involved in the Black Panthers.

By Lydia Lum

Odds are the answer involves armed African-Americans winding up in shootouts with police. Those images have overshadowed the Panthers’ free breakfast programs, medical clinics and other efforts to improve poor Black neighborhoods in the late 1960s .

Also overshadowed is the fact that a handful of Asian Americans were heavily involved in the Panthers. One of them, Richard Aoki, was a friend of BPP founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and influenced their ideology and the contents of the famous Ten Point Platform. Aoki was among the first dozen BPP members, rising to field marshal status. During the same period, at least two Asian Americans in Seattle became Panthers as well.

Yet the stories of the “Asian Panthers” aren’t well known even among scholars who study the Black power movement. Although BPP members were overwhelmingly Black, a handful were of Asian or Hispanic descent, says Dr. Diane Fujino, an associate professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara who’s working on Aoki’s biography. The non-Black members were few, and generally widely dispersed geographically, she says. And because Aoki kept his Panther membership hidden for more than two decades to protect his safety, some of the details of his involvement are murky. Fujino says she hasn’t found any mention of Aoki in BPP documents or in newspaper stories from the party’s early years, although Seale has confirmed Aoki’s membership. Some of the general confusion over Aoki even resulted in a gun-toting character in the 1995 film “Panther” being portrayed as Chinese, even though Aoki’s ancestry is Japanese.