Diane Kishimoto ’77 and Marilyn Go ’77 at their HLS Commencement.
Marilyn Go and Diane Kishimoto are the co-founders of APALSA, originally known as the Asian Coalition. They recently sat down with fellow alumna Jennifer Kim ’20 to reflect upon the founding of the Asian Coalition during the 1970s.
How did the Asian Coalition, now known as APALSA, begin?
DK: In Hawaii, before law school, I got a hold of Marilyn’s contact info, knowing we were going to be in the same class. I asked if we could chat before law school, so we met briefly in Hawaii. My cousin, Stanley Kuriyama, was also going to be in our class. This would be our first time living away from Hawaii. Our nervous mothers sent us off to school together. Marilyn, who had gone to Radcliffe for college, was our one-woman welcoming committee. We began to eat together at the Hark, along with George Okamura, a 2L from Hawaii, at an unofficial Hawaii table. Marilyn and I had no trouble tracking down the other two Asians in in our class. I accosted Cedric Chao in the Hark and I think Marilyn waylaid Oliver Wen in the tunnels. This informal group facilitated the formation of a formal organization. To organize, we put up notices and contacted people we thought would be interested.
MG: We were able to just look at the people at Harvard Law School to find the other Asians. We tracked down books from the upperclassmen and as far as I could tell, there were five of us in class of 1977, five in 1976, five in 1975. They had been accepting 5 APAs every year.
What did you do in that first year?
DK: We didn’t get formal recognition by the school as an organization until we were 2Ls. As 1Ls, when Marilyn saw that they were only admitting five APAs in each year, she said this is not right. We need to see the Dean.
MG: I went to the Dean’s office at the end of 1L and got admissions information confirming the number of APAs in each class in past years.
DK: I tagged along with Marilyn. We were told that Asians were being admitted, but that they didn’t always accept. Marilyn asked for the list of Asians accepted for the following year. We were in the Women’s Law Association and knew that they made calls to the women who were admitted. We decided that we needed to do the same thing. We immediately began making calls.
MG: We were very happy because we were able to get 7-8 people for the incoming class.
Once you got formal recognition, what types of activities did the Asian Coalition do?
DK: In our second year, Marilyn, Stan and Oliver shared an apartment where we had informal gatherings. We held a welcoming gathering for the 1Ls. We had a dinner with U.S. District Judge Robert Takasugi from the Central District of California. We often did things with the other Asian groups in the university — the undergraduates and other grad students. One night, Adams House had a kung fu movie event and the way it was advertised, we were worried about racial stereotyping. A bunch of us went to make sure the movie was shown respectfully. We also did activities with the Asian American law student groups at other law schools in the Boston Area, including a symposium on applying to law school. And then, by end of second year, Marilyn suggested that we sponsor our own alternative Moot court competition.
MG: It was an employment discrimination case. We had the oral argument in Pound Hall. Professor Bell, who taught an employment discrimination class I took, was one of our judges. And then we had a party afterwards. I brought my electric frying pan and made Chinese fried dumpling buns.
Who did you envision being a part of the Asian Coalition?
MG: I had insisted we call it the Asian Coalition, in part because in every class, at least one of the Asian students were not American citizens. I didn’t want to exclude them. I wanted it to be broader. And anyone who remotely wanted to identify could join.
Why did you start the Asian Coalition?
DK: I wanted to have a “home,” a place that people could feel at home. Some of us from Hawaii were not used to being a minority. Living in the dorm, I got to know a couple of other 1L women who were living away from home for the first time. One was a Chicana from a Texas border city and the other was African-American from Mississippi. They told me what the Chicano Law Students Association and the Black Law Students Association did to welcome and support incoming students. Marilyn’s purpose was more political.
MG: To put some context to our activities, students were a little more political back then. When I was in college, it was the anti-war years. People in my class were still from that political mindset. And there were so many things we could talk about.
DK: We were aware of what the other ethnic affinity groups and the women’s group were doing. In addition to law school admissions, we thought that issues such as racial stereotyping and employment discrimination needed to be addressed. One of my Caucasian classmates told me that any law firm that hired me would be happy – they would get a woman and a person of color, without having to hire a black person.
MG: Things were so different back then. Law firms were really just on the edge of being blatantly discriminatory at times. One of my black classmates made a complaint. She was the perfect test case – a really solid Harvard Law school student. And the interviewer she talked to said “Isn’t this funny, a black person working for [X] company?” There were a lot of other things. It was before the days of political correctness. Society has changed since then.
What was the relationship like among the different affinity groups?
MG: The minority groups really did work with each other, even the Women’s Law Association. At that point, we were still pretty small in number. I remember going to a WLA meeting at the beginning of my first year and it was a big celebration because we were told that Harvard had finally admitted 20% women into the class.
DK: I was shocked because it hadn’t been too long since women constituted only 12% of the student body. That’s when we started thinking “What about Asians?”
MG: We didn’t expect it to grow so much. I went back for a moot court conference and was told there were 60 APA law students in that class. Those were numbers I would’ve never imagined.
What message do you have for current APA students at Harvard Law and your fellow alumni?
MG: Stay involved. I can say this with personal experience – I had to withdraw from my more political activities once I became a judge. I ended up doing more student outreach and mentorship programs. I worked with a lot of the NY law schools; we put on job skills workshops, worked with the various APALSAs. To my disappointment—a lot of the more active students in APALSA completely fell off the face of the earth when they graduated. Maybe they found the job of their dreams. But there are so many issues that keep occurring. You have to stay involved and be ready to not only fight, but to support others.
DK: You need to remember where you came from. Just because battles were fought to get to where we are, the fight is not over.
MG: Nowadays, in the rise of anti-Asian discrimination along with the rise of COVID, we’ve taken many steps backwards. When you read news reports about elderly people getting attacked in Chinatown, it’s very scary and I think about it. Should I be going on the subway by myself? We don’t live in a perfect society. We all have to do our bit to try to improve society and life for everybody. We have to educate people. You have to be willing to be out there and give a helping hand. There’s so much to do.