Draft:Penny Nakatsu

Penny Nakatsu (born in 1949) was a member of the 1968 San Francisco State University (SFSU) BSU-TWLF strike as well as a co-founder of SFSU's chapter of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA).

Early Life

Nakatsu is a Sansei, born in 1949 in Honolulu, Hawai'i. Her father was in the US Army Military Intelligence Service, and her mother was a war bride. The couple moved to San Francisco in either 1950 or 1951 with young Penny. Nakatsu grew up in San Francisco and came from the Western Addition neighborhood of the city, which includes the Fillmore and Japantown. Nakatsu attended a Catholic primary school called Morning Star near Japantown, which served mainly Asian American students. She later attended Aptos Junior High School and Lowell High School in San Francisco. Prior to graduating from Lowell High School, Nakatsu applied to only UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University (SFSU), deciding to attend the latter in favor of smaller classes and a more personal education. In 1967, Nakatsu began taking courses at San Francisco State University (then called San Francisco State College), pursuing a degree in Asian American studies. As a freshman, Nakatsu wrote a thesis on the McCarran-Walter Act of 1950, which authorized the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in the US.

Professional Life

After graduating from UC Berkeley Law School, Nakatsu was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1974, marking the start of her career as a civil rights lawyer. As an attorney, she worked in the larger East Bay Area region, including Berkeley, Hayward, and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. Upon retirement, Nakatsu worked as a multi-faith hospital chaplain.

Activism

Growing up in a racially mixed community in San Francisco, Penny Nakatsu grew up acutely aware of racial discrimination and subsequently became extremely involved in student activism during her time at SFSU. As a college freshman, she began to learn more about the anti-war movement and the student organizations on her campus which were involved in anti-war efforts. In spring of 1968, Nakatsu engaged in her first political action on campus by participating in a sit-in to protest the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) on campus, as well as cutbacks made on the Special Admissions program at SFSU.

Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA)

Penny Nakatsu played a vital role in the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and the broader Asian American community during the 1960s. Her activism helped lay the foundation for important community organizations, academic departments, and educational programs that continue to have an impact today.

AAPA was founded in 1968 at the University of California, Berkeley by Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee. Its mission was to unite Asian Americans under a shared political identity and support their involvement in civil rights and social justice movements. The group rejected the “model minority” stereotype and opposed racism, U.S. imperialism, and social inequality. Penny Nakatsu played a key role in expanding the AAPA to San Francisco State University (SFSU).

After attending an AAPA meeting held by Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, Nakatsu and other Asian-American student activists decided to start their own chapter at SFSU in the fall of 1968. For Nakatsu and her fellow AAPA collaborators, it was important to establish an AAPA chapter at SFSU to spread the idea of a pan-Asian identity rooted in political action. They secured anthropologist James Hirabayashi to serve as their faculty advisor, who later became the first dean of the first Ethnic Studies program in the U.S.

At SFSU, Nakatsu became a leading figure in AAPA’s development. She was deeply committed to anti-war activism, which aligned with AAPA’s broader values. Under her leadership, the organization joined the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a multiracial coalition of student groups including the Black Student Union and the Mexican American Students Confederation. The TWLF organized a major student strike at SFSU, with Nakatsu playing an important role in the movement.² The strike resulted in the creation of the School of Ethnic Studies, which was the very first one in the United States.

The SFSU chapter of AAPA was ideologically influenced by the UC Berkeley chapter, as Nakatsu and other founding members engaged in collective discussions to form the organization's goals. They recognized the hardships faced by Asians as a result of racism and imperialism, viewing political action as a vital aspect for combatting this oppression. SFSU's AAPA aimed to provide its members with a critical political study. Participants read the works of Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and other Black Power leaders. For Nakatsu, this study allowed her to build a conceptual framework by which she could connect her activism as a student to issues of inequity both domestically and internationally.

Nakatsu also helped shape the academic content of the new school, contributing to the development of its original lesson plans. She worked hard to ensure that what was taught was accurate in reflecting the real-life struggles of the marginalized communities. In addition, she helped establish the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.

Penny Nakatsu’s legacy had a strong representation of activism, education, and empowerment throughout. Through her work with AAPA, TWLF, and the ethnic studies movement, she helped build lasting, physical institutions, as well as inspired future generations to fight for equity and representation.

1968 SFSU BSU-TWLF Strike

In 1968, SFSU's Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front coalition enacted the largest student strike in U.S. history to date, lasting five months (from Nov. 6, 1968 to Mar. 20, 1969). Penny Nakatsu, as a representative for SFSU's AAPA chapter and a member of the Third World Liberation Front, participated in the Third World Liberation Front strikes of 1968, which resulted in the creation of the College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S..

The Third World Liberation Front was a multi-ethnic coalition of student organizations such as the Black Student Union (BSU), Latin American Student Organization (LASO), Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action (ICSA), Mexican American Student Confederation, Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor (PACE), La Raza, Native American Students Union, and AAPA. Nakatsu, as a consistent AAPA representative, sat on the TWLF Central Committee and was a consistent voice during the SFSU strike. Because ICSA (Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action) and PACE (Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor) were focused on Chinese and Filipino communities, Nakatsu's work in AAPA focused on connecting with Japanese-American students.

Nakatsu became one of the most prominent leaders of the strike, as well as an outspoken voice in terms of connecting the oppression that students of color faced at SFSU to U.S. imperialism and militarism, which was actively oppressing Third World countries. Her involvement in the strike was due to her concern with the university's lack of interest in developing an Ethnic Studies program. To Nakatsu and others, this reluctance from the university to provide Ethnic Studies was an indicator of the institution's unwillingness to serve the East Bay Area community, to which Ethnic Studies would be of interest.

The goal of the BSU-TWLF Strike was to construct an ethnic studies into a respectable and viable curriculum to not only attract more Third-World, disadvantaged perspectives, but to create space within Eurocentric institutions. The strike came to an end in March of 1969 with a settlement promising a School of Ethnic Studies, the curriculum of which AAPA and other liberation groups were tasked with creating. Nakatsu and others involved in the strike had only weeks to build the structure of the Ethnic Studies Department to supplement BSU courses. The groups struggled to find materials to supplement classes with, but largely created original information to teach in the new department.

Black Liberation & Black-Asian Solidarities

In 1969, Nakatsu sat on a panel of female activists at a Black Panther Party convention in Oakland, held the weekend of July 18-21. The conference, called the "United Front Against Fascism" (UFAF), hosted the panel named "Women Speak Out Against Fascism".

Nakatsu's speech discussed the 1942 Executive Order by President Roosevelt (E.0. 9066), which ordered the incarceration of 125,000 Japanese-Americans, and the impact of growing up in these "concentration camps", as Nakatsu refers to them. She locates the incarceration of Japanese-American citizens as a precedent for the incarceration of political dissidents.

Her demand is that we do "not wait until we have positive, irrevocable proof of the racism, and the all-encompassing determination of our monopolistic capitalistic system to suppress all movements, all people who work for social change, who will work for liberation, who will work for the defeat of fascism and imperialism".

Deep solidarities were a part of Nakatsu's involvement in AAPA and beyond. AAPA's principles saw all struggles for liberation as collectively rooted and thus intertwined.