Search the Media Repository
Discover the curated images, videos, and primary sources featured throughout Foundations and Futures
History is more than just text on a page; it is the photographs, voices, and artifacts of the people who lived it. The images and recordings featured across Foundations and Futures are part of a meticulously curated media repository. Whether you are building a lesson plan or investigating an artifact, you can use this database to trace the provenance of our media: discover who created an asset, the historical context behind it, and how it can be used to bring Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences into your classroom.
Multimedia
Chapters
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UAW Members Don’t Like Your Import
Bumper stickers declared Japan to be America’s enemy; these were displayed at the UAW International Headquarters in Detroit in 1983. Japan’s fuel-efficient cars, not Germany and its pioneering VW Beetle, were blamed for the decline of Detroit’s huge, gas-guzzlers.
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Lines At Michigan Employment Security Commission
When the US industrial sector and the auto industry collapsed in the 1980s, after oil crises in the Middle East, workers across the US experienced massive, long-term unemployment, especially in the industrial Midwest.
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Video
Anger Towards Japanese Auto Industry
As massive unemployment dragged on for years, companies, unions, and the government were initially at odds. They eventually found a common enemy to blame: Japan and anyone who looked Japanese. Angry workers took their frustrations out by destroying Japanese cars.
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Video
Interview with Eyewitnesses to Chin Attack
Michael Gardenhire, an off-duty Highland Park police officer, and Officer Morris Cotton (in uniform) describe what they saw as an eyewitnesses to the baseball bat beating of Vincent Chin in front of the busy McDonald’s.
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Vincent Chin with Fiancée Vikki Wong
Vincent Chin and his fiancée Vikki Wong were to be married only days after his bachelor party, when he was savagely and fatally beaten. Their four hundred wedding guests went to Vincent’s funeral instead.
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Gary Koivu Remembers Friend Vincent Chin
Gary Koivu, Vincent Chin’s best friend, was at the bachelor party on the fateful night of June 19, 1982. He talks about their friendship, starting when he met Vincent in the first grade.
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Vincent and Lily Chin During Holidays
By all accounts, young Vincent thrived under the loving care of his doting adoptive parents, shown here with his mother Lily when he was about eight years old.
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Vincent Chin as Young Boy
Lily and her husband were drawn to the picture of a little boy in a Chinese orphanage. Though arranging the international adoption took a few years, they stayed connected to their intended son through additional photos that the orphanage sent.
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“David” C.W. Hing Chin Army Service
“David” C.W. Hing Chin (right, with cap), Vincent’s father, served as a GI in the US Army during World War II. He posthumously received a Congressional Gold Medal of Honor for his service in 2024, alongside many other previously unrecognized Chinese American veterans.
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Vincent Chin with Friends
Vincent Chin (first row, far right) became a confident and well-liked young man who had many friends, as shown in this photo taken at one of the many celebrations in the close-knit Chinatown-based community of Detroit.
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Raise Your Voice Mural
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s Raise Your Voice mural of Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X, at the Museum of the City of New York, 2022.
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From Harlem with Love Mural
This “From Harlem With Love” mural is located on the corner of 125th Street and Old Broadway in New York City, a block from where Yuri Kochiyama lived at the Manhattanville House from 1960 to 1999.
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Shuji Nakamura’s Artwork
Artist Shuji Nakamura (right) presents his painting to Audee Kochiyama-Holman (left) at Yuri’s Kochiyama’s Los Angeles memorial in 2014. Nakamura created the portrait for the “RISE: Love. Revolution. The Black Panther Party” exhibit.
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Eddy Zheng and Ben Wang
Eddy Zheng (right) and filmmaker Ben Wang (left) at a screening of the documentary Breathin’: The Eddy Zheng Story in San Francisco, CA.
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Asian Prisoner Support Committee
Yuri Kochiyama inspired the formation of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee. The APSC, formed in 2002, has organized against Southeast Asian deportation cases, led programs in prisons, and designed culturally relevant reentry programs.
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Video
Bill Kochiyama’s Testimony
Bill Kochiyama’s testimony before the CWRIC, 1981.
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Bill Kochiyama at CWRIC Hearing
Bill Kochiyama testifies about his concentration camp experiences at the New York Congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) hearings, November 23, 1981, with New York activists displaying Bryon Goto’s posters behind him.
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Yuri Kochiyama and Dylcia Pagan
Kochiyama visits Dylcia Pagan in 1993 at the Dublin federal prison in Northern California.
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Yuri Kochiyama Arrest
Kochiyama being arrested during a protest on October 25, 1977. She was one of 29 activists who seized the Statue of Liberty to demand the release of five Puerto Rican nationalists who had been held in US prisons for a quarter century.
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Mumia Abu-Jamal Poster
In 2010, supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal organized a rally on his birthday to demand a new trial. Kochiyama was one of the activists appealing on his behalf.
