Asian American and Civil Rights Movements
The principles and leaders of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s inspired many Asian Americans to fight for their own rights.
Even the use of the term “Asian American” – coined by activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee in 1968 to reject the racist term “Oriental” and to inspire a new pan-Asian social and political identity – was motivated by the Civil Rights movement’s ideals of pride and self-determination.
Japanese Americans participated in and helped lead this new pan-Asian American Rights movement. As with the Civil Rights movement, the Asian American Rights movement helped raise awareness of racial issues in America. It prompted many Asian Americans to examine their own experiences with discrimination, united Asians of various ethnicities, and highlighted the importance of cross-cultural solidarity in the fight to secure justice for all people.
Image: A poster announces an Asian American Political Alliance rally at University of California, Berkeley on July 28, 1968. The event included speeches by Bobby Seale, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, and George Wu of Hwa Ching, a militant Chinese rights group from San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Richard Aoki, an educator, civil rights activist, and early member of the Black Panther Party, also spoke at the rally, saying
We Asian Americans support all non-white liberation movements and believe that all minorities, in order to be truly liberated, must have complete control over the political, economic and social institutions within their respective communities…We unconditionally, support the struggles of the Afro-American people, the Chicanos, and the American Indians to attain freedom, justice and equality...”
Courtesy Asian Community Center History Group Archives.
