Black political leaders and civil rights activists told Asian Americans that they were with them.
Asian American activists and political leaders publicly acknowledged the reality of racism faced by Black people.
Two groups were reacting to violence. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year led to a surge in the Black Lives Matter movement. Six of the eight people killed at Atlanta spas were Asian women.
Protesters wore "Black-Asian Unity" T-shirts and held rallies in cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago. The two groups promised to work together to reduce violence and discrimination against people of color.
The results of that pledge are hard to find nine months later. In interviews, nearly two dozen activists, historians and community leaders around the country said that for the most part, no major efforts have been made to build bridges between the Black and Asian communities.
There was a lot of support for Black and Asian people to achieve change together, according to a co-director of Atlanta's Black Lives Matter chapter. Support died down when things died down.
Activists said that there were different reasons for the lack of unity, including that the Black and Asian communities view each other with suspicion. The main disagreement was policing. Asian leaders say that police are crucial to preventing attacks, despite calls by Black Lives Matter activists to reduce police budgets.
The relationship with law enforcement can be different depending on race. Black Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than Asian Americans, according to multiple studies.
The police killed 192 Black people in the United States this year, compared with 249 last year, according to data from the Mapping Police Violence research and advocacy project.
According to a professor at the University of California, Irvine, there is more skepticism about the police among black people than there is among Asian Americans. She said that Asian Americans see the police as protectors of private property rather than instruments of social control.
Ms. Rooks said that her group had not spoken recently about anti-Asian hate. She said that the bill signed by President Biden may have caused some Asians to feel that they had accomplished their goal.
We all come together for something major and then we go off and do our own things.
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Paul Mak, a community organizer in Brooklyn's Sunset Park district, said that their problems are unique. Desiree Rios was employed by The New York Times.
In New York City, some Asian American activists said they didn't want to work with Black people because they didn't agree on how to address hate crimes.
Paul Mak is a community organizer who supports harsher policing in Brooklyn's Sunset Park district, where reports of harassment against Asians peaked this spring. When police camped out in the area for a week in June, there were no new reports of hate crimes.
The debate has played out across generations as well as race, with younger activists of both races often viewing more policing as ineffectual.
In New York, younger Black and Asian progressive activists argued in May that strategies like self-defense training and driving services that take Asian elders to the grocery store were more successful at countering violence than more police officers.
Lateefah Simon, founder of the Akonadi Foundation, a racial justice group in Oakland, Calif., said she had seen younger Black and Asian activists in California working to form bonds through social media. She acknowledged that it was difficult.
Ms. Simon said that we need to do a better job of humanizing each other and not pointing fingers.
In California, the number of hate crimes against Asians increased by over 100 percent this year, according to Rob Bonta, the state's attorney general. More than 200 Black people have been killed by police officers in California since the beginning of the year, according to data from mapping police violence.
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Lateefah Simon is the founder of the Akonadi Foundation, a racial justice group in Oakland, Calif.
Carl Chan, the president of the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce in Oakland, urged the governor to deploy Highway Patrol members on city streets so that local officers could spend more time patrolling Chinatown.
Mr. Chan said that seniors are afraid to walk on the streets. Some Asian business owners said they felt safer when additional C.H.P. officers arrived, and some Black business owners and religious leaders wanted more policing.
The co- founder of the Anti- Police Terror Project, a Black-led group, said that more officers created a dangerous environment for people of color.
She said that many Asian progressive groups agreed with her that it was terrifying for Carl Chan to be able to call in the agencies that have historically brutalized Black and brown communities.
They said they had not spoken.
The political and legal systems in America have made people of color fight each other. If someone puts a piece of bread on the table between us after two weeks of not eating, what will happen? We are going to fight for that bread.
Black and Asian Americans have joined forces in the past. In the 1960s, the Red Guard Party and the Black Panther Party worked together to improve living conditions in San Francisco's Chinatown. The Asians for Black Lives movement sprang up in support of Black Lives Matter.
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In June of last year, Asians for Black Lives held a rally in Manhattan.
There have been disagreements. Korean business owners in South Central Los Angeles fought with poorer Black residents in the 1990s. Riots broke out after four police officers were acquitted in the beating of King. More than 2,300 Korean businesses were burned or looted.
Dr. Kim said the relations were caused by an inherent inequality. She said that Asian people are compared with white people because they don't trace their roots in America to slavery.
The median income for Asian adults in 2016 was $51,000, similar to the $48,000 for whites and above the $31,000 for Black adults, according to a study. The study found that Asian people were the most economically divided group, with the poor Asians seeing the least amount of income growth compared with their counterparts in other races.
Dr. Kim said it was difficult to find common ground. She said that a forum with Chinese immigrants talking to Black activists from a poor urban area would be a bad idea.
Black and Asian communities can be on the same page. They said that city leaders are reluctant to make policing changes unless minorities are present.
The Asian Pacific Environmental Network, a progressive Oakland group, has heard that if the community can't agree on something, then they won't make a decision.
Friends have sometimes disagreed on the front lines of this debate.
The local media was invited to a plaza in Chinatown by Mr. Chan when he asked for more C.H.P. officers in Oakland. The patrol team and Taylor are a friend of his.
Mr. Taylor denied signing onto Mr. Chan's letter requesting more policing. Mr. Taylor said he was concerned about bringing in officers unfamiliar with Oakland's standards for law enforcement.
He said in an interview that they wanted to have the argument within themselves.
