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Paul Sakamoto - Part 3 of 4

Interviewer: Connie Young Yu, Mike Honda, Vickie Taketa
 Interviewee: Paul Sakamoto (1934 - 2023)

Transcript of Paul Sakamoto

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Joy & Cultural Resistence Timeframe 0:00 >> 7:51

Well, it's difficult because you don't know in what ways you affect and students particularly that they come back after so many years and say, I remember you saying so and so and you don't remember, you know, what they're talking about. But you had that influence at that time, and so it's difficult to identify, except for those few students that come back and are tenacious about establishing a relationship with you. It's difficult because some of them ended up in San Quentin and you talk about influences that they come from all circles.

(Interviewer) Were these individuals that you felt you were you had to help?

You're trying to rescue them. They were already sort of endangered. So. So you felt that you would change them. Well they're easy to identify in a classroom because of their just their behavior. And and as a teacher, you try to reach them and sometimes you're successful and sometimes you're not. You know.

(Interviewer) You had a drawing or a painting that was given to you as a gift, but your students said it was, I don't know if you have it here, and it was a of a tree and you do remember.

Yeah, it's hanging right there in the hallway.

(Interviewer) You wanted to explain.

That was a class of 1964, and these students were at Los Altos High School, and they were very active in student government and athletics and all around students. And they spent a lot of time in my office and just hanging out. And and they ended up, one of them went to Harvard, and another one to Yale, and the third one went to Stanford. And they wanted to do something for me when they graduated. So they commissioned a drawing by an artist in Los Altos who did a watercolor of the three students and the bonsai. It's hanging right there in the hallway, and the bonsai has three branches and each one has the face of this young student. And I thought that was one of the nicest things I've ever had done for me. The idea of commissioning a painting is is probably foreign to most high school students, and yet they had the ability to research and get enough money to get-- commission this artist to do this painting. And it's one of my prized drawings that I have.

(Interviewer) So you mentioned a student that was in San Quentin, so somebody who fell through the cracks that you were trying to lift up?

Yeah. I found one young man who was considered not considered. He was the prison's lightweight boxing champion, and he was in for murder, second degree, and a drug situation. And he was so articulate and bright that I felt we had to do something for him. And we worked together and he eventually was released because he'd been in prison for over 15 years and he was so good that they hired him as a counselor at the prison after he was released. And I got him a scholarship to Michigan State University and he finished there with his degree, a bachelors degree in counseling, and he was such a good influence on the others because he had served so much time, he had a great status in the prison he could walk around any place. Even the guards respected him because he had such clout with his inmate fellows. And that was one of the few success stories I had when I was there.

(Interviewer) So where did you encounter him first? But in what situation did you encountered him first? In the classroom?

In, I was interviewing inmates in all the prisons in Michigan and took a random sample, and I interviewed him as one of the inmates. My project was to identify ways in which the prison system could help rather than hinder inmates, and to write a report on how the prison system could change. And look at rehabilitation rather than punishment. And so that was part of the stellar report that I wrote for the prison system's Department of Corrections. And unfortunately, my report was shredded because there were two people running for governor at the time, and prison system was one of the agenda items. And the acting, the governor who was seated, was being challenged by a candidate who used the prison system as a sample of his weakness as a governor. And so they shredded the report. So no one could have it, see it. It was whole worlds work. It was a doctorate thesis actually is probably better thesis than my one that I wrote for my PhD. Anyway. It was a great day on down time for me to have that happen, but I knew that I did some good, maybe a few people.

Systems & Power Timeframe 7:51 >> 23:09

(Interviewer) Paul, did you ever feel when you were exposed to a new population, or exposed to a new group of students that, did you find yourself learning something about yourself through that process?

You always do. I just... just the experience itself.

(Interviewer) Can you say what some of those things might be?

You're talking about the…

(Interviewer) Learning something. Yeah. Learning something from students like this individual who was in prison. You find yourself stretching yourself, dropping old stereotypes, just…

Oh, whenever you're a teacher, you run into that every day. You, you, you wonder how you could establish a relationship with that many students, usually 25 to 30 students at one time. And... it's a very, it's probably the most anxiety provoking period of any teacher, when they first come into a classroom and you look at all these faces, then you try to... you try to put your best foot forward and you know that they're evaluating you and you wonder whether you're meeting them, the expectations that they have of you and so over time, you establish that relationship because they get to know you and the teachers always say be strict at the beginning of the semester and then loosen up but never loosen up again. And you want to be a hard ass and have a reputation of being strict and having high expectations. And then you can work from there to help students much better than you trying to be buddy buddy with them at the beginning of the class. And that's the standard kind of training that fellow teachers gave you when you start at 21 years old in the classroom, not too much older than the students in front of you, and probably wiser and certainly streetwiser.

(Interviewer) What they told me as I first started that, and you got me in there, advice was don't smiles till Christmas. (Interviewer) Was your first class mostly white students?

Yes.

(Interviewer) And you were one of the few teachers of color. And were you the only one in their school?

Probably, yes.

(Interviewer) Yeah. And how did they react to you when you first walked in?

Oh, that's hard to say. I would, I think that they thought that 'This guy is not going to last, that he's the only minority in the whole faculty and we'll probably be able to run him out shortly.' But establishing that relationship was probably the most difficult more than the subject matter or teaching.

(Interviewer) What were you teaching?

Biology and general science. And that helped because of the subject matter itself was interesting. And the students could do the experiments and not sit in the chair the whole period and they were active in learning.

(Interviewer) Yeah, you influenced Bob Douglas, remember him? (Interviewer) How did that first class turn out in terms of rapport with your students?

Oh, we both learned a lot. I would say that that's probably... the learning curve was sharpest in the first few years of teaching, because after that you have your lessons that you can determine whether they're successful or a failure. And by that time, you have done pretty well.

(Interviewer) One time you told me that this is where we were at back at AACI, and he said, You know, what really rankles me is when I hear somebody behind me saying,"Ching Chong", you know, making up, you know, racist doing a racist dialect, you know, and you asked me said, doesn't that bother you? You know? So did you feel that when you were walking down the corridors of school? Yes, definitely. In fact, you trying to choose which way you walk because of the cluster of kids who would do that.

(Interviewer) Is this when you were a student or when you were a teacher? Both, more so as a teacher. Particularly with that group of kids that are somewhat questionable as far as the student status is concerned. And it's a way to become more accepted by their peers. If you yell at a freshman teacher, they can feel bad.

(Interviewer) Things that would be considered a hate crime now. Did that ever diminish?

Oh, yes. Over time, once they found out that you're a good teacher and you're, you're strict, but you're fair, they recognize that. And then the relationship does change.

(Interviewer) So they saw in you, somebody who was also respectful of them?

Yes.

(Interviewer) Did you get a sense of that?

Oh, yeah. You have to have that.

(Interviewer) But during that time, you already have a lot of background as far as, you know, studying about the prison system in Michigan. You knew about crime and you know, the tough side of society. So that was always in the back of your mind that you have, you have quite an experience in your studies. Particularly in the prison system. Because I, I was, in Michigan, there aren't too many Asians who are in the prison system either way as guards or as inmates. And I remember walking into the courtyard, is the largest prison in the world. A wall prison, that wall prison means that the wall itself becomes a prison. And I remember walking out onto the yard and all of a sudden people were playing volleyball and the whole pool of inmates, they stopped the whole prison and stopped. And they they saw me come in on the quad, on their courtyard. And I said to one of the inmates later on, that I got to know I said, 'Why did they stop and stare at me.' And they said, 'Well, you're a foreigner for one thing. Secondly, we wanted to see what kind of dress and what kind of pants you wore because we were we don't know what the style is outside.' And we were looking at your coat and your pants and shoes and to get to know what's happening outside.; And I thought it was myself that they were looking at and not my dress.

(Interviewer) Stylish. Get the prisoners to stop dead in their tracks to look at. Paul, were you already informed about the population, the ethnicity of the prisoners?

No, I asked about that and I said, 'What percentage are Black? Because I can't help but see the majority of color?' And they said, 'Oh, it's probably 28%.' And there's no way it was. It was more like 70% or 80%. I remember when interviewing inmates one I asked the guard to not be in the room when I interviewed. And he said, 'Are you sure you want to do this?' And I said, 'I, I'm fairly confident.' I said, He said, 'Well, maybe what they ought to do is to look at why that inmate's in prison before you decide.' And it was for double murder. And so I changed my mind and, I said, 'I think I feel that I have a guard with me during the interview,' because it was too dangerous at that time.

(Interviewer) How old were you then?

I was working on my PhD so I was... 30-something.

(Interviewer) So when you were teaching biology in high school, that was in California.

Yeah. Sunnyvale, Sunnyvale.

(Interviewer) Sunnyvale, Sunnyvale. And they have kids that would, you know.. You know, Sunnyvale had the highest percentage of minority students and any in the Fremont Union High School District, which is pretty much white. And the Sunnyvale maybe 20 or 30% minority. (Interviewer) At least. You had Paul Fong then. Benny Brown, ... you had... Iman Gonzalez.

Yeah, become mayor of Sunnyvale.

(Interviewer) The mayor of... San Jose. (Interviewer) Did then Ben Menor go there? Was he from Mountain View?

He was a teacher at Mountain View High School. Yeah. Future counselor? Yeah.

(Interviewer) I just talked with him on the phone. (Interviewer) I just want to follow up on the students who have make fun of you behind your back when you first was a teacher in Sunnyvale. So these would be white kids. Yeah. Okay. And the-- even though there are Asians in in the school, they could still, they probably made fun of the Asian students as well did they?

Mhm.

(Interviewer) Oh they did.

You can always tell when they were snickering and they were saying something but you could tell that it wasn't racially motivated and that they gained status along their care and having the guts to to make these comments, even though that I may not have heard exactly what they said, you could tell that they were trying to make fun of you.

(Interviewer) So does that strike a chord? Talking about the idea of nurturing everything that you see to bring out the best uh..

It's it's hard to say because you don't know where that comes from. And that is to say that part of that may be the culture in which I was raised, and that culture includes the Asian population, that that's kind of what we were raised by doing, by helping others. And doing-- trying to do your best. Well, lot of what happens to you in life is, is luck and I remember, I was in graduate school in Michigan State, running out of money and thinking that I'm never going to finish this degree here because I don't have the funds. And I was really down and my advisor was Dean of the School of Education, had a lot of the prestige and the power in the university. And he saw me sitting outside his office and he says, 'What's wrong?' And I said, 'Well, I'm not sure I could make it financially.' And he said, 'Let's, let's think about that.' And he's the one that searched, had his staff search the awarding of scholarships and fellowships, and he's the one that singlehandedly gave me the grant to do the prison study. And that was just a matter of sensing that I needed help and otherwise I couldn't have done it.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 23:09 >> 25:43

Oh, initially my trust, my energies went to Japanese American needs... and when Allan Seid came on the scene, he stressed a pan-Asian approach to problems. And that made a lot of sense to me, that we would include all Asians and not just Japanese and oh… I was impressed with some of the other things that Allan was talking about, and that was that we would not just talk about problems, but we would do something about it. And we would be an action oriented organization and that we would attend meetings and be known or be seen at these public meetings and so I was surprised at how effective that was, particularly attending public meetings, that it makes a significant difference to the members of the board or whomever to look out in the audience and see some different faces that even though that they might not feel the pressure, the people who are elected as Mike would know, feel a sense of responsibility as they look out into the audience and some faces of color. It makes a big difference and it doesn't cost anything except time, and therefore, the attendance at city council meetings and school board meetings became really important to AACI. It was no cost, and yet we had the time and the interest to do that kind of participation and it made a big difference in the results. And eventually things started to change, and I was pleased with that. And that's why I decided to become more active in AACI.

Timeframe 25:43 >> 29:37

(Interviewer) So there was no concern about backlash in your personal life, on your professional life as far as being out there.

There always is some price to pay for that, particularly in, as you go up the chain, that becomes more serious. That people think that maybe you're just a one item, one issue candidate.

(Interviewer) Did you feel any of that backlash or any of that pushback personally...just being active, overtly active, political.

It pays because of what's called the Brown Act. You have the closed session, and you don't know what happens there because no one is allowed to attend except just the elected people officials. And you never know what's being said about candidates, especially during closed session.

(Interviewer) But you didn't feel threatened, or nobody threatened you personally? Because you were active.

No. It's more subtle than that.

(Interviewer) Did you ever think of running for office?

I'd been asked but I... I don't take criticism well. And so I didn't actually seriously pursue that, and I guess I wanted people to ask me. [Interviewer: so no one asked you to run at all as well?] No! No one asked me. No. [chuckles]

(Interviewer) Well, maybe they figured that you already had this position. Superintendent of schools. Yeah, but you could have been gone, you know, if you wanted to, if that was your inclination. But did you feel that you were not a political-- you were not cut out to be a politician? Did you feel that?

No, I felt no. In one case that I was a superintendent of schools, of a district with three high schools, only three. And that to look at a district with, say, a quarter of a million students, and they... all their support staff, that goes with it. I felt that I wasn't qualified on them because in the jobs I've had before, I went up to the chairs, but I had the experience of working in that district. So I knew a lot about the staff and students so forth, and I felt really well prepared to get them to the next step. Whereas to go from three high schools to 60 or 60 or 70 schools. And I, I had one of the things I did was to visit classrooms and I had superintendent, and you can't do that in a large district. Or you could try, I suppose, but--

Transformation & Change Timeframe 29:37 >> 38:44

(Interviewer) I thought you did one of the toughest things that anybody could have done is a superintendent at Mountain View. It was amazing.

And that was the biggest challenge I had in my career. Yeah, because we were faced with declining enrollment and we had to change. We had to close one of the schools in order to make the budget. And we had a racial issue also, since most of the students were of color lived on the, of the north side of El Camino and Sunnyvale High School was the only high school that had a high percentage of minority students. And we had to disperse, by law, to integrate the school district. While they were very-- People were very unhappy about that because they felt things were just fine because there were minority students who were all over on the north side and they didn't bother the people in the South Side. So we had an integration issue to challenge, and and we had the problem of selecting a staff that was sympathetic to integration and... to, and that was, that meant that the younger teachers were probably the better ones who could handle the situation. And, and... one of the board members suggested to me that maybe you ought to look at changing the names of the schools.

Well, that was something that the alumni would have a fit over. And so I was challenged with that. And so we decided to close in on the high schools to move the students to a newer facility rather than stay in the old Mountain View one. And we changed the name of one of the schools to the Mountain View, one of the schools we dropped was Awalt, and he was a former trustee. And so politically it didn't affect anybody, but the Awalt family and they were very upset. But that was just the minority of people in the community. So we changed the name of one of the schools. We moved the students and integrated the school district, moving students from Mountain View to Los Altos was also a challenge because the faculty felt that they did well, because they were good faculty, not the fact that it came from rich families. And so we had very intensive in-service for that to overcome that. So we settled finally with, and we had a public hearing, we had public hearings every weekend for the public to voice their opinion on the recommendations that I made to the board. And the board finally accepted my recommendation to close Awalt, rename it Mountain View, racially integrate the school district, and balance the budget.

(Interviewer) And all of that without a court order.

And it before the Integration Act

(Interviewer) All the things that you done was it was skillful. (Interviewer) That you brought all the stakeholders to the table and to give them all a voice. (Interviewer) If you played bridge, that would have been a grand slam.

But I was pleased that after that occasion, the decision that I had, the 17, I helped 17 school districts boards select the superintendent.

(Interviewer) How do we place affordable housing in areas where there are a wealth of resources for the residents to participate and they're going to come up against a lot, what you're talking about what you met head on, and that is to how do you bring all the stakeholders to the table to have a voice? and uh…

You have to stress the resources, the, the, the fact that the minority students are suddenly coming over to our school, a white school, they have to see what the value of integration was that our students to learn to get along with each other and to appreciate the culture of the minority students, was the most important. And to be able to convince the students and the parents-- the parents are very important because they generally go along with what the kids say. And to have the fact that the integration of the school, of having a student of color in the classroom, mixing with other the kids is more important than numbers. And that's very hard to get through because people want the immediate results. They want-- they want the teachers that they had before. They don't want change. And they are less likely to accept minority students if they have to give up something for their own kids.

(Interviewer) You wanted your students to be the beneficiaries of-- of the entire community to make sure they were a success, meaning your staff, your faculty, administrators, the budget, your board, and then the communities. Everybody is, is... they might have disagreed some, but came to a decision that this was the best, and so…

People don't realize the energy it takes to get something like this across. Yes, I was out every night of the week meeting with small groups of parents who were very upset that we were changing, making these changes in the school system. And I often wondered whether it was worth it because of the energy it took from me, and meeting group after group. And facing this criticism about racial integration, particularly. Part of it, it was a challenge for myself, wondering whether I had the guts to do this and whether, in fact, I would be successful. And if I was not successful, what would happen to the district as a whole? Yeah, and that was tremendous responsibility that I felt. And the sufficient... say, common sense, among the constituents, the parents that they know ultimately what's best for their kids. And, and there are always a bunch of supporters and groups too who give you cheering, backing, support. And that helps you get through this, and your ability to explain why you're doing such a thing, and that it's not vindictive or... not a nonsensical administrative edict or...

Timeframe 38:44 >> end

(Interviewer) What did you see this see in, this group of Asian Americans [AACI] who wanted to do something?

Our particular challenge was the students that came in from all these different countries and making sure that they received a sound education, and that their parents were, were... were not a problem because the drive for success and education came from the family. So our job as school administrators particularly was to see that the students had an equal chance in the classroom, and that they had the rights of any student. And whether that be physical education or mathematics. And the influx was so great that an organization like AACI was super important because there was no one organized enough to look after the segment. And that's where I was impressed with Allan and what he had to say about equal rights and and helping these students adjust to the American way of life.

(Interviewer) Also this same time in 1976, you organized the Why America Conference, which was really for the whole community. Why America, the oral history. So you felt the need to continue education for the whole community?

Yeah. Why America was a weekend seminar to educate the general public as well as to hear from those who are directly affected by the transition of the students.

(Interviewer) So did you feel that this was a way that AACI could, could, you know, work on several levels? I mean, not just service, but continue the education and affirmative action. That was one of our initial goals.

Yeah. Particularly since a lot of what we were talking about was foreign to these new immigrant that they didn't understand what services that we offered that they were eligible for, and that it was not just for the native citizens.

(Interviewer) What was what were some of the issues in AACI that you guys had to deal with on behalf of the…

Well after a while that was interesting because students and the citizens who felt that they were they faced some sort of discrimination came to us to ask for help. And we became one of the only organizations that was open to have people come in. And people were fired from the job that they felt was due to their nationality, people who couldn't speak the language and were fired. And so we became like a sounding board for citizens who didn't quite fit. And I think that was one the important roles of AACI initially.

Yeah, I guess I'm happy about the successes that AACI has faced over the years, but like any large organization, as all organizations get larger, that tends to lose something. And I felt that... that it wasn't as goal oriented as we had before. Yeah. And it got out of hand because more funds were available and with the funds comes with problems and I think that, that's one of the reasons that I didn't become as active continually as I probably should've.