Former militant Richard Aoki informed FBI on the Sixties' Asian American activists

The sunglasses became a trademark for the militant Richard Aoki.

IF YOU WERE an Asian American college student in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s, it was difficult not to be affected by what was happening in the area of civil rights that bubbled over to impact all communities of color. 

Out of that cauldron of discontent arose one young man, who was able to bridge the African American civil rights struggle with the then-fledgling Asian American civil rights movement.

Newly released FBI documents obtained by investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld indicate that Aoki was more active as an informant than initially thought. Read the full story here. 

As the new documents show, Aoki informed on his fellow Asian American activists as well as Black Panther leaders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who were his friends. He also gave the FBI information on the Third World Strike and its principle leaders on the UC Berkeley campus.

Aoki met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale at Oakland's community college, Merritt College. Rosenfeld wrote how Aoki  supplied arms and weapons training for the militant Oakland-based Black Panthers. He eventually was named the organization's Field Marshall.

A young Richard Aoki in a confrontation
with police in a demonstration 

According to Rosenfeld's report, besides the Black Panther Party; Aoki provided info to the FBI about the Asian-American Political Alliance; the Young Socialist Alliance; the Socialist Workers Party; the Red Guard, a radical group in San Francisco's Chinatown; and the 1969 Third World Liberation Front strike and several other campus political groups at Cal.

The University of California Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and the cradle of the students' anti-war movement, may have looked like the center of a pending revolution to our country's intelligence and local law enforcement agencies. At least that's how then Gov. Ronald Reagan viewed them when he sent in the National Guard to restore order on campus.

Coupling the campus unrest with what was happening the streets of Oakland, the FBI's long-time director, J. Edgar Hoover, declared in 1968 that the Panthers, who by now had chapters across the nation, posed “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” 

Based on the new documents, Rosenfeld writes:

"Three of the newly released reports concern the Asian American Political Alliance, a nonviolent civil rights group founded at UC Berkeley in 1968 to oppose racism, the Vietnam War and U.S. “imperialistic policies.”

"The group aimed to break the silence of what its members saw as all-too-conformist Asian American communities. It supported the Black Panthers and other minority 'liberation' groups. The FBI investigated the group as a potential threat to internal security."

Aoki spent his formative years in one of the infamous internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII, earned his street cred in the streets of Oakland as a gang member and studied at Berkeley. He committed suicide in 2009 by shooting himself in his Berkeley home.

Since his suicide, Aoki's story grew in stature. In a 2009 feature-length documentary film, "Aoki," and a 2012 biography, "Samurai Among Panthers," he is portrayed as a militant radical leader.

It was a surprise - nay, a shock to his friends - when it was revealed in 2012 that Richard Aoki, who was part of the inner circle of the Black Panthers and a leader in the Third World Strike, was an FBI informant.

Hyphen Magazine wrote a four-part series on Aoki after Rosenfeld's 2012 expose. Many of his fellow Asian American activists couldn't believe that the man who was a leader in their organizations  was an informant and came out strongly in defense of a man they considered a friend. One of the reasons he was held in high esteem was because he was one of the few who could link the discrimination faced by Asian Americans with that of the Civil Rights struggle led principally by African Americans.

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