A Dancer in the Revolution

Honolulu
March 19, 1986

I had been in a relationship for quite a long period of time with Ann Hitch. We had broken up several times and she had gone to Hawaii and liked it very much. We had been corresponding, even though we were not together, and she invited me to come to Hawaii and see how I liked it. I liked what I saw and decided in March 1986 to investigate further. Finally I made my move and settled in, becoming a “child of the land” or Kamaaina in Hawaiian, and I really think that Hawaii, of all the states in the Union, is the one that has the greatest possibilities for realizing the American dream of a multiethnic, nonracist society.

Naturally, because Ann was a Quaker, my first contacts on arrival were with the Quakers. This was a small group of approximately fifty or sixty people, and I did not see myself operating within the social confines of that group. I did not feel that this group was a proper outlet for me with my experience, so I soon began to ask where I could meet people in other ethnic groups, because the Quakers are primarily Caucasian or Haole. I think there may have been one or two Hawaiians, a couple of Chinese, a couple of Japanese, but they’re preponderantly Haole and I wanted to make some contact with the non-Haole local community.

I was very fortunate in the sense that the president of the African-American Association lived in the apartment building where Ann and I were living. His name was Umar Assan, and we had passed each other and hardly spoken, but one day he stopped me and said, “Mr. Johnson, would you like to come to an African-American Association meeting?” It was December 12, and Jesse Jackson was the guest speaker. So I went to that meeting and enjoyed it very much, saw a lot of folks who were members, and I figured that if I were going to have a base of operations, this Association would give me the opportunity to network in the African American community.

What impressed me immediately was the level of acceptance. It usually takes a while to be accepted in a community and to get to know people, but I would go out to demonstrations and introduce myself and say that I was interested in community organization, and I also formed a number of friendships with Third World people. I found that through the organization I was able to meet a number of leading people in the Afro-American community on an intimate level in numbers that in any other place would probably have taken me months or years.

After exposure to many groups, I tried to calibrate where the people were politically, and from using my own experience as a calibrator, I came up with the year 1930. I felt that the level of thinking corresponded to this period and I tried to explore why that was, and I think it was because they had not experienced the same struggles that had taken place on the mainland. They had not known the civil rights movements of the 1940s and 1960s. And as I looked at it from a sociological viewpoint, I realized that Hawaii understandably is determined by an insularity that serves as a buffer against the impact of the political and social trends that take place on the mainland. I discovered two kinds of insularity in Hawaii: the insularity of an island people with the ocean acting as a buffer, and then the insularity of the people who have been socialized into the military and insulated against participation in the civilian world; so it’s kind of a double dip of insularity. Believing in self-determination, I consider it unfortunate that Hawaii is a part of the United States, yet it did not reflect the social and political outlooks that had been formulated on the mainland as a result of struggles. Of course there were the struggles of the plantation workers, but the Black community was not very much a part of that, so the trade union consciousness that permeates the Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese communities, and to some extent the Hawaiian community, is not at the same level. Most of the African Americans appeared to me to be individual entrepreneurs or professionals with what E. Franklin Frazier called a bourgeois outlook.

Another factor that I think accounted for this awareness gap is that a large number of those who settled in Hawaii came from the military, which has a conservative impact on one’s thinking. The disciplinary regimen of the Army, Navy, and the Marines is not conducive to creative thinking and free political expression, especially of a liberal or radical nature, and many veterans who are released, even though they might be militant in their response to segregation, generally have a conservative outlook on those questions that transcend the race question.

Despite difficulties in terms of the dissent and differing levels of political awareness in the Black community, I was committed to remaining in Hawaii for four or five years. What was remarkable to me is that this group, in the African-American Association, despite this background, emerged with a forward-looking effort to make the Black presence visible, so that it seems almost as if secretly and by osmosis, some of the perspectives of the ’40s and ’60s came through, although in a slightly different way than in the Black communities on the mainland. I wanted to see some changes made while I could look at them, and the fact that the first major campaign the Afro-American community undertook was successful with the passage of a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday bill convinced me that with the same kind of unity and energy expended in that direction, even more fundamental changes of a positive nature could be made.

In a short space of time, the Association had a spearhead project to create a Black newspaper, to help it achieve its primary goal of making the Black presence visible in Hawaii, and we saw the paper as a primary instrument in making that happen. I was asked, after a couple of false starts, to be the editor of the paper. And I agreed in March 1987. I discovered afterward that there had been a newspaper called Harambe that had had a short existence. If I had known this at the time the Afro-Hawaiian News debuted, I would have asked for it to be called Harambe in parentheses under the Afro-Hawaiian News, so the continuity would be kept. We completed a year with twelve successful issues of the paper, so, while it was not the first Black newspaper in Hawaii, it was the Black newspaper of the longest duration. Many of the editorials I wrote for this paper were noticed by the community at large and printed up and commented on in the Honolulu afternoon paper, the Star Bulletin. Thus I realized when working with the Association that I was not in the most advanced Black community, and despite this context, we were successful in bringing the Dr. Martin Luther King holiday to be created and observed in this state.

I went to one of the state parks that have a number of plant and flower exhibits, and the tour guide was telling us how many plants that are foreign finally take root in Hawaii and sometimes adapt so well that they threaten and endanger the native Hawaiian plants, and some of them take on the characteristics of the Hawaiian plants in their adaptation. There’s one cactus plant, when it becomes indigenous to Hawaii, that gradually loses its spines so that it becomes a “friendly” cactus, and I analogize to the Black community that there is a kind of parallelism in this process in the Black community, where you find that among the Blacks there is an aloha spirit, and not quite as militant and spiny as on the mainland. There is a kind of softening effect that takes place, that sometimes accentuates the conservativism. Many Blacks, for example, have told me that you have to be careful how you do things here, and they say, “You don’t talk stink.” This attitude is close to a Japanese custom, a type of inscrutability. I have noticed that many of the Blacks have taken on these Japanese ways. I have not reached a view on whether that is negative or positive.

In my five trips back to the mainland since I moved to Hawaii in 1986, every time I returned to Hawaii I felt as if I were coming back home. As a New Yorker who lived in New York from 1933 until 1986, I really discovered that I had come to love Hawaii, and the atmosphere. We had formed a powerful coalition and marched together, talked with elected members of the state legislature, and campaigned successfully for a meaningful holiday of empowerment, recognized in January 1989, not just for the Black community but for all peoples: native Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Philippine Americans, Samoans, Fiji Islanders, everyone.