Annie Li

This project examines the lives and activism of Chinese American Presbyterians from San Francisco’s Chinatown, who mobilized in the Civil Rights Movement in the South and the Asian American Movement in the Bay Area. When they returned from the South, their West Coast activism overlapped with other social movements, such as the Black Power, Farm Workers, Free Speech, and Anti-Vietnam War Movements. Drawing upon archives, oral histories, ethnography, and creative nonfiction, this community-engaged work aims to uncover the history of Chinese American religious activism in the twentieth century and create an archive of primary sources to capture these narratives. Forging new historical connections between the Civil Rights Movement and the Asian American Movement, this work also considers how the past shapes the activists’ religious and political lives today.