The crusading spirit of the 1960s prompted some American-born children of Chinese immigrants to respond to Chinese calls for help. Two forces in particular stoked the fires of activism.

One was the civil rights movement led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., which began as a grassroots effort among southern blacks in the 1950s to end Jim Crow but spread rapidly across the country through the following decade, when television cameras brought into middle-class homes the ugly spectacle of southern sheriffs turning hoses and police dogs on blacks engaging in peaceful protests. Sympathy for the plight of African Americans in the American South soon expanded to include a more general interest in human rights, particularly for people of color living in white-controlled societies.

The second force was the Vietnam War, in the background of which was the largest college enrollment at any time in American history. As the nation debated why we were in Vietnam, students on campus after campus organized marches to protest the war. Once again, television played a critical role, first in dramatizing the horrors of war in a way never before possible, and second by sensitizing sensitizing white Americans to the fate of nonwhites in developing countries across Asia.

Few regions in the country were more politically active than the San Francisco Bay Area. Campuses like the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State College became centers of protest, not only over the war but also about a wide spectrum of social ills in American society. Relatively large numbers of ethnic Chinese students attended these schools, and, inevitably, many of them, inflamed by the passion of the times, carried that passion back to their Chinatown neighborhoods, determined to address the discrimination, against American-born Chinese as well as new immigrants.

The results of their activism were mixed. For one thing, reentering Chinatown put some of these ABC crusaders at tremendous risk. Not only were they at loggerheads with the powerful capitalists who exploited new immigrants, but they also came into close daily contact with dangerous youth gangs. Volunteers were often threatened and harassed, and one social worker was murdered. Barry Fong-Torres, the idealistic, Berkeley-educated twenty-nine-year-old brother of journalist Ben Fong-Torres, had taken a one-year leave of absence from his job as a probation officer to become director of the Youth Service and Coordinating Center in San Francisco Chinatown. Despite his genuine efforts to reach out to troubled immigrant teenagers, the local gangs feared he was an undercover agent and resented his talking to leaders of rival groups. Eventually, Barry Fong-Torres was gunned down in his apartment, with a misspelled note left near his body: “PIG INFOMERS DIE YONG.”

(Chang 271-272)