By GUY AOKI
It was March 15, 1996. Jesse Jackson had been telling the media he was planning a boycott of the March 25 Oscars because out of 166 nominees, only one was black. Eddie Wong of the Rainbow Coalition arranged a conference call with mostly black leaders, Latinos, and a couple of Asian Americans, including me, to discuss strategy and logistics.
Jackson reiterated what he’d told the press: He wanted black actors to take a stand and boycott the Academy Awards. He was calling for a viewership boycott too. I took a deep breath, knowing what I had to say was crucial but may not be taken well.
“Jesse, I don’t think you should call for a boycott. I think you should still have the protest and keep talking about all the important issues, as you have been. But don’t call for a boycott. We have no control over what makes people watch shows or not.
“Maybe they’ll tune in BECAUSE of our protest. What if more people tune in than last year? The headlines will read: ‘Jackson’s Boycott Fails’ and all the important issues we’re talking about will be ignored. They’ll play it like a football game, where one team won and the other lost.”
There was silence. Finally, John Mack of the L.A. Urban League spoke. “Uh, he’s right, Jesse.” Others started murmuring louder and louder. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”
“Now, wait a minute!” Jackson protested. He reiterated there comes a time when actors have to decide which side they’re on. I asserted they didn’t have the power to change things. If they’re labeled troublemakers, they’ll get even fewer opportunities in show business.
I countered: “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not one of those Nielsen families. And I don’t know anyone who is! We can tell everyone we know not to watch the Oscars, but if they’re not monitored by Nielsen, it won’t register!”
It took half an hour until Jackson reluctantly agreed.
MANAA had its first leadership retreat in Malibu on March 23. I told some board members that I couldn’t join the protest outside KABC on March 25 because I had to write Dick Clark’s syndicated radio countdown show “The U.S. Music Survey.” But Ben Bulatao, Rita Hollingsworth, Tom Eng and Cheryl Villareal could.
We prepared Ben on what to say to the press, and I made sure Jackson looked for him to join him on the front lines. Asian Americans needed to be seen and represented; this was our cause too.
Ben, who’d previously not taken Jackson seriously, began to respect him. In most of his interviews with the press during that 3½ hour protest, Jackson mentioned not just black people, but Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, women, even senior citizens as being those left out by the media. But most reporters only called it “a black boycott” for black people.
Ben was furious. But he marveled at how the reverend had brought together so many races for this common cause.
The next day, a close-up of Jackson surrounded by a line of multi-ethnic supporters around him with Rita Hollingsworth to his right, was splashed across the L.A Times’ front page. “Did you see the paper?” her husband Jeff asked me. “Rita looks so pissed!” We both had a big laugh.
Here was this woman with bright red hair arm-in-arm with Jackson. No, it wasn’t just black people. One of the pictures also showed Ben along with Native American Sonny Skyhawk.
Rita and Ben followed up with several in-person meetings with Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition.
On April 22, I joined Jackson and 15 other civil rights leaders and media advocates in a meeting encouraging CBS President Leslie Moonves to add more minorities in his TV series. I praised Moonves for allowing my friend Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa to break his typecasting as a villain to play a lieutenant in the San Francisco Police Department on “Nash Bridges” starring Don Johnson and Cheech Marin. It made sense, given the number of Asian Americans and Latinos in that city.
I challenged him to do likewise — reflect reality on his other shows. “Well, I accept your challenge!” he said with a smile.
After the meeting was over, Jackson told me “we Negros” were going to have lunch at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. I’d love to have joined them and solidified our bonds, but it was another Monday and I had to get back to writing my show.
On July 8, without Jackson, Rita and I and a coalition of groups (including the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Don Bustany, my old “American Top 40” boss) met with CBS’ vice president of current programming, suggesting ways of integrating diversity policies into the network.
I pushed for a timetable to get improvements done. But there wasn’t enough follow-through from Jackson and the coalition.
Nothing really stuck until the fall of 1999 when, across the four top networks, no person of color (POC) starred in any of the 26 new shows. With angry cries of boycotts coming from multiple groups, ABC, Fox, CBS and NBC were dragged kicking and screaming into annual meetings, eventually providing us data on the number and percentage of POC they were hiring as cast members, recurring cast members, writers, directors, even participants in reality shows.
That lasted from 1999 to 2019, and it’s why television was finally forever changed: We convinced the networks that featuring more POC was not only the right thing to do, it was a smart business move. Because our growing ethnic communities would watch shows that featured people who looked like themselves. The executives were leaving money on the table.
But it took the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rainbow Coalition, and activists from all backgrounds to get the ball rolling back in 1996 (30 years ago this month!).
Jesse, it was an honor.
Guy Aoki is the founding president of Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), the all-volunteer media watchdog organization founded in 1992. For 25 years, he wrote “Into the Next Stage” for The Rafu Shimpo, the longest-running column on Asian Americans and the media. Opinions expressed in Vox Populi are not necessarily those of The Rafu Shimpo.