A Bookstore for Everybody

Harvey Dong's "Third World Liberation Comes to San Francisco State and UC Berkeley" also appears in this volume, page 95.

After the Third World Strike, students sought to expand the ideals of the movement into the community. The International Hotel issue became a uniting point, with students and community residents working together to save the hotel and Manilatown. The new resistance opened further channels of involvement, and one extension of this new cooperation was the collaborative effort to start Everybody's Bookstore (EB) to serve the community. This bookstore far exceeded the originators' expectations. Little did those initially discussing its worthiness realize the long-term contributions it would make.

The following are personal recollections of how Everybody's Bookstore came into existence. Many thanks and acknowledgements to Steve Wong, its manager, for his input into this article and for his many years of envisioning, developing, maintaining, and anchoring the first Asian American bookstore in America. Many thanks also to the rest of the bookstore staff, who put in countless hours building shelves, cataloguing titles, working behind the counter, assisting customers, and believing in the ideal of establishing a source of knowledge for the Asian American community.

Everybody's Bookstore opened on January 1, 1970. Located at 840 Kearny Street in the International Hotel building in San Francisco Manilatown-Chinatown, it became established as the major source for books about the Asian American community and became an integral part of the progressive movement. However, very little is known today about its ten-year existence and the mark it left on its community.

Most of the bookstore's founders were members of the UC Berkeley Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), an organization involved in the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strike for ethnic studies programs at UC Berkeley. 1 AAPA and the TWLF grew out of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. After the strike there was discussion within AAPA about where to continue the struggle. The TWLF strike literature focused on establishing third world/ethnic studies courses that were educationally relevant and on promoting progressive change in oppressed third world communities such as San Francisco Chinatown and Manilatown.

Even during the strike AAPA members were attending rallies in support of the International Hotel tenants in Manilatown. Some 130 Filipino and Chinese tenants, mostly...