our history as a first generation you did the americas to the local area and how we have assimilated through this area into this area and and thereby how as a relation being with the local community and i was a local can you look at us and how do we look at the the multimedia resource are trains who's trying to capture that history and pass that on to other generations that are still young here or are coming generations so as part of that this interview is is the first of this dialogue and we welcome you both for and thank you for five and this is the last university i taught it i started university of kentucky then the university of toledo then notre dame university and then here and i came out here to be chair of american ethnic studies that is asian american studies chicano latino studies african american studies and then to put together this this major the students could have a major and we took the courses from arab american indians studies which was in a separate department and combined it into a major for students who wanted to major in american i think studies and so and i did that for and stayed in the department for over maybe ten ten years and then i moved back to just doing sociology so i could write books and you i say this all the time with pride well before i came to the united states i was doing all kinds of things so i was working in different groups o to college for one year and then came to the united states and started at seattle pacific university now i guess it is university and then shifted to the university of washington and then after having been graduated in sociology there  intention of ever trying to learn about the culture about anything else outside my school my schooling now at this point i have to say to to occupied my mind engaged in all kinds of work i i did what whatever or my or my works and graduated there and came back to seattle and all this time i had a family to run i have to have had a big concern for my and many more if you're going started surfacing in seattle talk to i could go to chat for a visit or vice or whatever and now if you are started coming in and we started forming a  group meeting at certain places spending time evenings and so on and then maurice you can start coming in and you know how many there are in seattle area today today the funniest thing question no i have to say this when if you have just started dropping in coming in from time to time there are a couple of us who used to go to the airport expecting yorkers to come and we the pacific northwest authored by in a very insightful book though we i think those of us that will be lucky enough to read it i have to really get it i will be reading it will be informative because my history is not as long as you to hear obviously so i think it's good because  this is the way we capture history right because like dr atala said he spent a lot of years here there's no as well as far as i know there's no history of this document that journey and it's good for us to know how we have of course it can be bought directly by from the publisher publisher and then of course the university of washington bookstore because it but the cheapest place is amazon i was on dot com ok it's probably content of the book here that we just showed to the audience here tell you about the content the content and the current is what actually what he was beginning to say ok who were the first people and how many were there anything any institutions at all and they'd just be no restaurants no church no social groups other than informal ones that they they used to have space for themselves that kind of thing so it's about their early group of people who came and how they established the institutions like the church like the various businesses that they had like the other institutions like schools and clubs and so forth and of course it's about their struggles their successes and their failures because some people could adjust atala say he was like the loneliest person well that's a very common thing since that loneliness was a very common theme all the way through for these people because they were a small group of them and they were totally culturally alienated from the american culture the food was different the way people dressed the customs and courtesies and so forth which were different in so many of them emotionally broke down and then of course you had people who were able to survive the emotional stress and go and push forward and get married see this this was talks about this these people before they even got married get married and had children and even how some of them got wealthy it is described in the book and they were not afraid to tell how they got wealthy you know like buying one house with two incomes and then buying a second house and living on one income to use one of the other income to buy a house and then read the house so now they had a second income they were using and they were also renting the new house that they bought right now they could buy another house and in seattle it was at a time when the value of houses kept going up so that think about it and in a ten year period you could be a millionaire in seattle because of of the house yes you see and they did the same thing with businesses how they started there some of them started serving meals in their homes and then they were able to get a property just to have their own restaurants with their wives and other people cooking and so forth that kind of thing so it it develops the earliest institutions like the businesses like the churches like the clubs social clubs what happened when they started having children what were the conflicts between the parents and the children we were talking earlier about the fact that the children did not see a good reason for hanging on to the parent the values of the parents or the behaviors of the parents because they didn't fit in american society and of course the parents didn't see good reason for the children to act like an americans because their values and their behavior to many of them was they were those things were profane they were not sacred you know they were actually profane and they thought that their children were being just lead and many of them were they thought that their children were learning none ethiopian values and learning american values which were destructive not only to the children for example arms guns i mean you know this idea of having guns and using guns wasn't it ethiopian thing and you could see how they could be destructive in an immigrant community it's the same way with education because many of them came as adults young adults some as teenagers they would put them in school with elementary school children because they didn't give them a separate school if you didn't if you had just a one year of worth of english education you were put in the first grade with just little children i mean you know that was that was you know that that that was not acceptable and they felt like oppression being educated with with it with children and what one treat it like little children you know so all of these things are developed in the book so that you can see how the community has has grown power has developed how remember later on that is  raged or listened to friends chatting about anything that was written say came up on the b b c or different kinds of radio messages or television or i came up with this book and the other one is something that i that i always loved to do from the beginning of my my education really from childhood doctors reading books i love to read books books are my life my companions today i live in an apartment so i live alone but i never say alone i have my books extremely important that's what makes people people people who never were ever to even sit down in a classroom for a day who would become the greatest some personal concerns regarding our community cultural and ethical situations that one could very well observe these days want by any means no matter what this is the mentality so i started to put this together and i came up with what you can to get through any problem now this this this this i became aware of this during the last few years some there are some people who by time with time and patience so a collection of  raising and projects coming up so please keep in touch and follow us on facebook i hope you have a great year and please keep in touch with us i noticed the kind of enthusiasm from all of the students who are here i noticed as well that all the students will be trained for great work that being trained for the media and the media is extremely important i try to do what i can in terms of african american history in terms of writing african american history but it's really up to the media to try to spread that story and so that's why i think what you guys are doing is so vitally important in terms of the future of black people here and across the globe as well as all of the people in seattle and all the people in the u it got started out not necessarily to tell them what to do but just how i did it and just my story but for me this program has been no way to connect with people to want to create beautiful things they're found in photography i guess i help i help the students learn certain skills like basics pretty much and i also share my experience and i try to inspire them to really power them to create their in power when i was there in the early seventy's i went to ethiopia even though they said leslie was still in power so you can see though that for actually all of my adult life i've been involved in doing research so i did research in africa i did my desart ation coming out of india university in puerto rico and it was on social change and community family infertility about how puerto rico puerto rico was was modernizing and how they were moving the modernization of puerto rico was moving it from a traditional  latino culture to a more egalitarian culture but of course that created all kinds of problems in the family because women wanted to be equal and the factories moved in and they hired women more than men and the men were still working in the fields that the women were now making money and the men wanted the money and the women said oh you have to talk to me first because before they did have to talk to the women they just told the women what to do you see so i had already studied that problem that i had that i had done research and argentina i would i was full bright scholar a professor and i taught and i taught in argentina and the to lead us i was able to compare those two cities in terms of the style of crime the causes of crime and the two different criminal justice systems so by the you had communes you didn't have capitalism no capitalism nobody had public cars no public transportation you know and everybody was wearing a mouse so women and men were wearing  suits and but i saw the possibility that they were going to introduce capitalism and so i wanted to find out i started interviewing people to see how they thought and how they plan to make the transition from communism to capitalism if they introduce the market system you see so by the time i come here i really have all of this background and the reason why i did this book is i could see the ethiopians coming and i knew that this was a historical moment because here is the here is the historical moment after slavery the united states did not resettle any africans in the united states until the ethiopian skate and they had to pass special legislation to allow fifteen hundred ethiopians to come and it was that break that opening the door but door in america that began  the the the resettlement of refugees from ethiopia and then of course after about five or six years they started resettled settling some others by nine hundred ninety five som just ethiopians that were being resettled so i knew it was a historical moment that needed to be captured because i had been ethiopia so i had something to compare it to and i also had studied these other recent research so i knew that they were going to have to adjust in of to a radically different culture and society has different  technology economics culture individual is that you're responsible for yourself in america where the ethiopians didn't know anything about being responsible for for yourself they worked in families you know they were depending on their family and so to tell an ethiopian he's here alone he have to survive on your own by your own intelligence by your own energy by your own whatever you have you have to survive a lot of them couldn't do it they didn't know how and they said they didn't know and they emotionally broke down you know and he had and i had some ethiopian students that i had taught at the university of washington and they told solomon about me having been to ethiopia and so for them my interest and so salomon introduced himself to me and we both decided since he's a historian we both decided to collaborate to capture this is stork a moment of ethiopians coming   i've lived during a very important historical moment right so this is an intersection of his biography going all the time right in different parts of the world you know and i think  that that will make an interesting story the intersection of biography and history and different parts of the world in which i was working or living i see what you got to oh my industry is interesting yet i never accept one or two of those books and everything else i worked on was triggered by something very interesting every time when i start working on one  and then all of a sudden while i do that all of a sudden something triggers my mind and i pick that up and do research on that and more research on that  have no culture or you have no history you know when they ask if some day someone ask a black person the other day how many generations can you trace back and this person said four because people don't know their history and they don't know their culture they can't even ask the questions when people give them this stupid question they can even add to that properly so that that's the answer if we don't want our kids being stupid and acting stupid and not having a vision of where they've been and where they're going where hopeless and so black history month is to make children away or of their long long long ethnographic history in the world their contributions to culture their contributions to the culture of this society like i wrote a book called the black revolt and it's about how blacks liberated themselves you know historically in the united states you know and we didn't just get liberated because they wanted us to be free you know we had to go through a whole series of strategies like all kinds of make white people decide they cannot keep this society going the way they were going there were over four hundred slave revolt very few people know that you see and that's part of this p destruction by you know burning the fields and rioting and tearing at what they're doing in some cities you know even as we speak coalitions with other ethnic groups in order to you know get more political power which is what blacks are trying to do now to put maybe put somebody in office like obama who will protect their interests so the series of these strategies like litigation legislation rebellion coalition and so forth and they're in my book the blacker both of this all these all of these strategies that blacks have used th if you allow me to do this i like to do it this way i don't want to lose connections i don't i don't want to jump from the edge to the other so my my my solution for th significance of it they don't even know such a thing as the fact that there was a battle that don't want a very significant italians were taken prisoners of war the significance and moreover it's now universally recognized by political marked the turning point in the situation and the direction of our future roads our past our future are known and recognized and moreover we have a reach heritage to proudly pass on to the next generation of ethiopians closed the chapters of two protagonists standing with equal determination one to colonize and dominate and the other equally to determine  people of color could be challenged the history of black people in the euro you can the united states is even more my kind of fide by the fact that it is being celebrated the closing of the black