journey with the very first ethiopian americans arriving in their early sixties seventies and now a lot thousands of us here and we have history here and now and m m r t i the multimedia resource and trains just trying to capture that history and pass that on to other generations that are still young here or are coming generation so it's part of that this interview is the first of this dialogue and we welcome you both for and thank you for joining us so i'll start off by 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 for america 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 th department for over maybe ten ten years and then i moved back to just doing sociology so i could write books and and do other kinds of research rather than be one thing i'm proud of myself i don't say this to people all the time but i still remain an ethiopian there are people who get puzzled  times when they hear me speak on having how come you have been in this country this long these many years and still don't mix english there and went 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 th well i said ok now what do i do up to that time i had no 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 sit down and think about what exactly why i'm now here what am i going to do 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 life i have to go through and during this period of time why i have i had to have i have to say this is to go to say this at the beginning when i arrived here  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 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 and a very insightful book which i think those of us that will be lucky enough to read it i haven't read it yet 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 because like dr louis said he spent a lot of years here there's no as far as i know there's no history of this documenting that journey and it's good for us to know how we have g course it can be bought directly from the publisher publisher and then of course university of washington bookstore because it but the cheapest place amazon i was on dot com ok it's probably content of the book here that we just showed to the audience here to tell you about the kind of the content and the content is what actually what he was beginning to say ok who were the first people and how many were there so i interviewed several of the first twenty five people who were here including doctors and ezra to show me and others and before they had a church before they had anything any institutions at all and they'd just be no restaurants no church no social groups other than informal ones that they feel they used to have space for themselves that kind of thing so it's about that 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 words were different and 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 to 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 well 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 reading 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 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 a 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 misled 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  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  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  a couple of things you mention that record six or seven years ago i had a book out  c or different kinds of radio messages or television or even from friends and relatives from from ethiopia tell me whatever happened whatever dog killed finally after seventeen years at the end of the end of the period 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 talk to my books and they talk to me so i had this this this passion about making people read books because that's extremely important that's what makes people people people who were never world who who are made who they are where they were by reading books so that vantage of reading books communicating this to young and old was extremely important to me and i came up with that after a low research and so so i came up with this book and that's one 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 patience you can do anything you can get through any problem now this this this this i became aware of this during the last few  well if you open people i know folks they know what they face they have learned through thousands of years the advantage of taking my patients and we're able to do anything by time with time and patience so a collection of that you know just an audience all of these people were in there just out of power or they were still 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 of africa i did my desart ation  coming out of india university in puerto rico and it was on social change and community family and fertility about how puerto rico puerto rico was was moderniz 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 of the women women are 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  was full bright scholar a professor and i taught it i taught in argentina and there i was looking at law and crime and comparing a city in argentina rosario argentina with toledo ohio where i also taught at the you know is 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 time i came to to seattle you know i and i did i tell you i had gone to china  transportation you know and everybody was wearing a mouse suit women and men were wearing now 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 planned to make the transition from communism to capitalism if they introduced 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 or running eighty early eighty's they were almost all just ethiopians that were being resettled so i knew it was a historical moment that needed to be captured different culture and society has different end technology economics culture individual is that you're responsible for yourself in america what the ethiopians didn't know anything about being responsible for for yourself if they work 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  they emotionally broke down you know so all of this was you can see the how good this is right you're saying all of this dynamic going on and i'm thinking somebody has to capture this so solomon got to hand was teaching at a community college 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 e 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 the reasons that you know ok because i've lived during a very important historical moment so this is intersection of his biography going on all the time right in different parts of the world i start working on one thing 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 thinks that you 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 you know but 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 the problem 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 strateg devices to make white people decide they cannot keep this society going the way they were going there were over four hundred slavery but it's very few people know that you see and that's part of this long history of liberation and so black history is about teaching about all of these strategies then a geisha any c p s legislation they any 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 their whole series of these strategies like litigation legislation rebellion coalition and so forth and there and i think the black or both of this all these all of the strategies that blacks have you seen historically to liberate themselves to get us to this moment that where you having right here right  a better and better place to live a weird we are now working to make sure we have the best possible education for our students is so important that we no matter what you're doing what you enjoy doing you do well in school all of the at the commissions that celebrate the rich diversity of washington state and that also have come together to stand up against executive orders that seek to try to ban our muslim brothers and sisters from the borders of washington state and the united states well i think that there's a perception that washington state and seattle also are a very whites state and city but i think events like this show and remind me that we live in a state a city with a rich diversity both in ethnicity in terms of where people are from in terms of religions and also cultures and so i love coming to these events to talk with people and to see what's happening around the state in terms supporting immigrants and refugees and again celebrating the rich diversity that is here in washington state absolutely i would say that both the mayor marion mayor ed mary and governor jay inslee stand shoulder to shoulder  united in saying that we're all welcoming city and a welcoming state we accept refugees welcome refugees in this country vietnamese refugees as well as chinese immigrants and east african refugees have all contributed to the great fabric that is the pacific northwest and so we will always be a city in a state that say we have opened doors to our vulnerable neighbors and folks who are running away from strife and from political turmoil you know we want to provide them a safe harbor one thing that i know about m m r t i is that emirates has a great mission of empowering young people through media through arts and culture than in order to do that you need to bring people not just all around seattle hall around the state of