Seize the time...Again!

By Frank Irigon

Members of the Asian Pacific Islander community and their allies gathered at Seattle Central Community College on March 2 to commemorate a struggle of forty years ago that transformed the perspective of their community and whose influence was felt throughout the Puget Sound region.

In 1971, on February 9 and again on March 2, led by co-chairs Alan Sugiyama and Mike Tagawa, the Oriental Student Union demonstrated at Seattle Central Community College, closing the district’s administration building to protest the lack of Asian American administrators at the multi-ethnic college.

“If there are no Asian administrators working, there will be no one working”, declared at the beginning of the peaceful demonstrations.

Sugiyama pointed out that highly qualified Asian Americans who applied for top jobs at the college were consistently not hired or passed over for promotions of lesser-qualified whites. Tired of these injustices, the Oriental Student Union decided to seize the time and correct these injustices by holding peaceful demonstrations.

The demonstrations brought together the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, American Indian Students Association, Young Socialists and sympathetic white students in support of the Asian American demonstrators and their demands. Ironically, the top administrator at the college was an African American who instead of being a harbinger for change was an opponent of it. He decided that in no way was he going to capitulate to the demands of the Oriental Student Union. Instead he was going to fight them.

These demonstrations were a portent of things to come in the metamorphosis of Seattle’s Asian American community in the coming decades. Young people from the community would no longer choose to let things slide and not cause waves. The community became dedicated to direct action to change things for the better. Once baptized in the waters of civil disobedience and taking it to the streets, the Asian American community was emboldened to challenge the status quo. They were no longer going to be the model minority. They were going to stand up and be counted among the brothers and sisters who
clamored for peace and social justice.

Out of the cauldron of the demonstrations at Seattle Central Community College spawned many more direct action activities, from the founding of the Pacific Northwest’s truly Pan Asian community newspaper, the Asian Family Affair, to the Kingdome demonstrations. The former published the news that was important to the Asian American community that the local media suppressed, and the latter prevented the loss of the character of the International District/Chinatown to the construction of the Kingdome and kept it as a neighborhood for its primarily Asian elderly residents.

In the end, though it didn’t happen immediately, the Seattle Community College District hired an Asian American, Dr. Peter Ku, to a campus presidency and later its chancellor. Presently, an Asian American, Mark Matsui, is president of North Seattle Community College. But there is room for improvement not just on this campus but also in other community and technical colleges in the State of Washington.

In the face of today’s economic challenges, the burden of paying for the state’s financial insolvency is falling on the backs of the poor, the middle class, retirees, and on labor unions’ right to organize. The burden is falling disproportionately on people of color. Isn’t it time for all of us to seize the time, again!