With short, gray hair, frameless glasses, and a petite build, Merle Woo, easily looks the part of an inconspicuous, sweet-natured grandmother. However, when Woo takes the persona of the Yellow Woman, all assumptions of a gentle little lady can be brushed aside.

Merle Woo speaking at Freedom Hall in Harlem, homebase of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women. Photo by Lorraine Chow

The poem “Yellow Woman Speaks,” is Woo’s personal manifesto about a follower-turned-leader who speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves.

‘And I will expose the lies and ridicule
The impotence of those who have called us
chink
yellow-livered
slanted cunts
exotic
in order to abuse and exploit us.
And I will destroy them.’

So who is Woo? At age 69, Woo proudly claims several identities: socialist-feminist activist, writer, poet, radical, lesbian and retired educator. Each of her titles surfaced the afternoon of Nov. 21 when Woo read her poetry and discussed her socialist political ideology before a group of 50 people who came to hear her in Harlem’s Freedom Hall. The site serves as the homebase for the Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, two leftwing, socialist organizations with a platform against capitalism, institutionalized racism, sexism and homophobia.

During the reading, Woo chose selections from her poetry that reflected the different aspects of her personality. The poem “Transgender” spoke about how “being gay is something you can hide but you’re never yourself if you’re not out.”

In an excerpt from “Letter to Ma,” Woo lamented how her activism and homosexuality were difficult for her first-generation Korean American mother to easily accept. Her mother had raised Woo to become totally assimilated into American culture. Growing up in San Francisco, Woo wasn’t allowed to learn Chinese and was pressured to act like a “real” American.

“In my family, all Americans were white and the Chinese were not Americans. So there was that horrible internalized racism,” she said.

Although some of the transformative events in her life took place decades ago, her poetry was a draw for many in the audience.

“The optimism is my favorite thing about [her] work,” said Jed Holtz, 23, a Freedom Socialist Party member who moderated the event. “[She’s] fighting for people to realize their full potential and that’s a really amazing thing about being a revolutionist. Merle’s poetry is really an embodiment of that optimism.”

After the reading, Woo delved into her life as a social activist. She said she was “radicalized in the 60s and 70s” alongside the rise of the Black Panther Party, the Yellow Power Movement and the Women’s Movement. She calls it an “awakening time” in her life.

Her most notable sticking it to The Man involved her vocal support of the Third World Strike at UC Berkeley in 1969 where Woo was working as an untenured Asian American Studies lecturer. The protesters, comprised of four ethnic student groups, were fighting the Berkeley administration to restore ethnic studies programs like Cantonese and Tagalog classes in the curriculum and had asked Woo to write a letter of support.

“The faculty who were approaching tenure said, ‘Why should we continue community Cantonese? After all, at the end of the semester all they can do is read a menu,’” said Woo about her decision assist the student protest. “But I thought I would like to read a menu and tell a waitress in Chinese what I’d like to order.”

Her support of the strike ultimately cost her job Berkeley. In reaction, she filed suit in state and federal court charging free speech violations and won and was reinstated fulltime in her position.

Woo’s activism resonated with the attendants. “She has fought and won for free speech and against discrimination based on race, sex, sexuality and political ideology,” said Holtz, who has been a part of Freedom Socialist Party for six years. “So basically she’s fought for all of us in here.”

After leaving Berkeley, Woo took positions at San Francisco State’s educational opportunity program and later at San Jose State’s women’s studies program. She eventually retired in 2003 and while she is done with “serious” academia, Woo now spends most of her time working as the education coordinator of the San Francisco branch of Radical Women. She teaches the newer members about feminism and how to be active in an era that lacks the mass cultural fervor of the youth in the 1960s.

In a phone interview after her speech, Woo said young people are not attracted to social justice today because they are either too apathetic or too concerned with résumé-building to notice the injustices of a capitalist society. “A lot of students now just want to get their degrees and a job,” she said.

However, Woo optimistically noted half of the attendants at her speech were members of the Freedom Socialist Party or Radical Women and the other half were curious community members, a sign that people still care about the socialist message and want to learn more.

“In times when we don’t have large activist movements, the most important thing is for people not to feel isolated and to join organizations,” she said. “When people don’t have organizations in their cities they should start organizations of their own based on their interests.”

With an apparent scarcity of mobilized Gen-X’ers present at Woo’s speech, Stephen Durham, 63, an organizer of Freedom Socialist Party said a major problem for his party is bridging the generation gap. He hopes to draw younger generations to the group, and not just the older activists. “We need new people that aren’t just from the movement,” he said.

In addition to the challenges of staying relevant to the younger generation, the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women are also struggling to pay the rent. In fact, the Merle Woo speaking event was part of a fundraiser to keep a roof over the organizations’ heads in their New York headquarters at Freedom Hall.

“We found, like a lot of community organizations, we’re going to have a shortfall this year because the rent went up and it’s hard to pull the dollars together,” said Susan Williams, coordinator of Freedom Hall Fund Drive.

Williams later reported the speaking event helped raise enough money to secure another month’s stay in the venue and continue their fight.