Warren Furutani (Student in 1968)

He served two terms representing his native Gardena and San Pedro in the state Assembly, where he formed a bipartisan Community College Caucus and carried legislation that authorized California’s public colleges to grant honorary degrees to people of Japanese ancestry whose education was interrupted by being forced into camps during World War II. That year, 2009, CSM awarded several such degrees—and invited Furutani to give the commencement address.

“College of San Mateo was a pivotal turning point in my life,” Furutani says. Though he had long been interested in activism and civil rights, CSM—particularly the College Readiness Program and its director, Bob Hoover—taught him he had a specific role to play and work to do.

Furutani encountered CSM while visiting a high school friend nearby. Drifting into the College Readiness Program, Furutani found a learning community that was multiracial, intellectually curious and run largely by and for students themselves.

Examining all the ‘isms’

“It was based on students re-examining their lives and perspectives,” he says. “Racism, sexism, classism, the Vietnam War, all the ‘isms.’ All the belief systems had crumbled. I’m seeing pictures of Asians running down a dirt road on fire [in Vietnam], and I’m being asked to fight them. They look like my relatives. This is the context.”

He studied the works of Black and Latino revolutionary authors and thought deeply about his own community’s marginalization. Like most Japanese-Americans of his time, he had parents who’d been forced into camps—in fact, his parents met there. Their history was all but absent in school curricula. The generation gap that afflicted 1960s society was often wider among Japanese-Americans, because kids Furutani’s age had trouble relating to their parents’ defining life experience and because the parents didn’t talk much about it.

Bob Hoover was widely asked to speak about the CRP as its reputation grew. He always brought students to speak with him, and he liked the group to be multiracial. Furutani, as one of the program’s few Asians, got tapped to speak often.

“I learned how,” he says. “I’d make a joke about the ‘Oriental’ food we were offered in the cafeteria—at best it was a poor representation—and how that showed just how little people knew about us. You know, food is universal. People could relate.”

Furutani was on the podium, in fact, on the December day that preceded the 1968 Uprising. In the face of budget cuts and a new, unfriendly administration, he and others demanded the program continue.

The speakers were arrested for inciting to riot and then suspended. (Though such proceedings are usually confidential, they became public when Furutani sued to block the suspension in federal court.)

“I was contacted to come on campus to talk, and I thought I would be reinstated,” he says. “[Fellow CRP student] John Brandon and I drove up to the office and we were swarmed by officers. I was pulled out of the car and pushed out of the way; they weren’t interested in me at all. They grabbed John, and they arrested him for violating probation.” Brandon, a gifted speaker who had served time for armed robbery, had failed to connect with his probation officer.

In the debacle, Furutani found his life’s calling.  

“I was a side story in this thing, but it moved me down the road considerably toward movements of Asian-American solidarity,” he says. “It thrust me in the middle of those things.”

Rebuilding Asian-American advocacy

After graduating from Antioch College, he helped to establish ethnic studies departments at UCLA and other colleges while on staff with the Japanese American Citizens League and other groups. He helped colleges establish admission pathways for underserved students of color.

Asian-American advocacy “needed to be rebuilt,” he says. “It had to address needs of the elderly, and of young people at risk from drugs and gangs. That’s what we did. Most of the social-service programs that exist today are from those times.”

Furutani helped to make the Manzanar concentration camp declared a national historic site. He worked on educational policy for future L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, then speaker of the state Assembly. Having Furutani’s first son enter kindergarten sparked his own run for elected office.

“I didn’t want the schools my sons attended to be the same as the ones I went to, that my father went to,” Furutani says. “Nothing would change by itself.”

Furutani remembers his tenure on the LA city school board as his toughest job.

“Wherever I went, I’d be confronted with some issue. I’d be getting my teeth cleaned, and immediately I’d have to deal with some issue because I’m dealing with the most important thing in people’s lives, their kids. There’s no buffer. It’s face to face. It always had a hard edge.”

He is proud of his 10 years as a trustee of the Los Angeles Community College District, largest in the United States. During his tenure, district voters passed their first bond measure in decades, raising $1.2 billion in 2001 to replace ramshackle buildings with modern facilities at the district’s nine schools.

Today, Furutani is writing a book that includes a chapter on his CSM time. Asked for advice to young activists, Furutani urges them to consider governance.

“I crossed the Rubicon,” Furutani says. “I’ve been an activist all my life, but I crossed the line and worked as an elected official. As an activist I always advocated from a position. Then I got to a point when I didn’t want to just espouse a position. I wanted to change things.

 Finding common ground

“You can do that from the outside or from the inside. I had a vested interest, my sons. If you govern, you have to govern from a position of a solution. You can talk about the problem all day long.  Somewhere along the line you have to commit to finding solutions. As bad as the situation is, local government is the only solution I see.

“You’ve got to get involved in governance. And that means compromise. It means finding common ground. A good education is the broadest common ground for people and their children. Ethnic studies and learning about who you are is a part of that.”