Author: Renwei

By Esther Toshiko Hirabayashi Furugori, Special to The Seattle Times

Gordon Hirabayashi believed the forced removal of 120,000 Japanese Americans was unconstitutional — and he went to prison for his belief, writes guest columnist Esther Toshiko Hirabayashi Furugori.

Thursday marks the 73rd anniversary of an American day of infamy. On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which set in motion the forced removal of my family from our Auburn-area home, joining the exile of 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast to American concentration camps.

My family was first forcibly removed in crowded, hot trains to Fresno, Calif., arriving at a stark place surrounded by barbed wire fences called Pinedale Assembly Center. A month later, we were transported by bus to the Tule Lake Relocation Center in Northern California.

Conditions were harsh at both locations. Crammed into open ceiling “apartments” no larger than 20 by 25 feet, no conversation or movement was private. Everyone was forced to adjust to a culturally uncomfortable reality of sharing everything from meals in mess halls to humiliating communal showers and latrines with no privacy dividers.

I was just 13, and my family kept me busy playing softball, reading Nancy Drew novels and enjoying music. Looking back, perhaps they wanted to distract me from thinking about my brother, Gordon Hirabayashi, who wasn’t with us. He was in prison.

Before our forced removal, the entire Pacific Coast was under a federally imposed curfew for Japanese Americans. Gordon was attending the University of Washington and he strongly believed that this curfew and Executive Order 9066 were unconstitutional.

Deliberately staying out past the curfew, Gordon turned himself in to police and demanded that he be arrested. The police officers knew Gordon and told him to go home, but he persisted and was arrested by the FBI, tried and found guilty of violating the curfew. With no transportation paid for by the government, Gordon refused to pay his own way to go to prison in Arizona, so he decided to hitchhike.

Gordon also refused to be sent to the concentration camps or serve in the military, spending nearly two years in different prisons while appealing his curfew verdict. Eventually in 1943, his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled against him.

Gordon’s principled stand was both unusual and lonely. Hardly anyone stood up for civil rights in the 1940s like they did in the 1960s, and most people in the Japanese-American community — let alone the nation at large — disagreed with his views as being unpatriotic and criticized him for making things harder by “rocking the boat.”

Forty years after his Supreme Court verdict, the U.S. District Court in Seattle overturned Gordon’s conviction. Blockbuster evidence was uncovered that the federal government deliberately withheld important military documents from his Supreme Court case, disclosing that racial reasons and not military necessity were used to justify the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans.

After the war, Gordon earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in sociology from the University of Washington, enjoyed a successful academic career and received many awards including our nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Among all of his accomplishments, I’m most proud of my brother for his courage to protest the unbridled use of power by our government during times of fear, war hysteria and racial prejudice, and, since Sept. 11, 2001, I suspect that Gordon wouldn’t mind if I added religious intolerance to that list.

Gordon died on Jan. 2, 2012. To ensure that his story lives on and inspires generations to come, our family is honored that the permanent Legacy of Justice installations of public art and interpretive elements will be the cornerstone of the mixed-use Hirabayashi Place project currently under construction in Seattle’s Chinatown International District.

“I never looked at my case as my own, or just as a Japanese-American case,” Gordon said in reference to his overturned conviction. “It is an American case, with principles that affect the fundamental human rights of all Americans.”

Esther Toshiko Hirabayashi Furugori is a charter member of the Hirabayashi Place Legacy of Justice Committee.

Source: http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2025728913_furugoriopedinternment19xml.html

JOHN LEWIS, “SPEECH AT THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON” (28 AUGUST 1963)

[1] We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of.  For hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here.  For they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages at all.  While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars a day, twelve hours a day.  While we stand here there are students in jail on trumped-up charges.  Our brother James Farmer, along with many others, is also in jail. We come here today with a great sense of misgiving.

[2] It is true that we support the administration’s civil rights bill.  We support it with great reservations, however.  Unless Title III is put in this bill, there is nothing to protect the young children and old women who must face police dogs and fire hoses in the South while they engage in peaceful demonstrations.  In its present form, this bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear of a police state.  It will not protect the hundreds and thousands of people that have been arrested on trumped charges.  What about the three young men, SNCC field secretaries in Americus, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest?

[3] As it stands now, the voting section of this bill will not help the thousands of black people who want to vote.  It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama and Georgia, who are qualified to vote, but lack a sixth-grade education.  “One man, one vote” is the African cry.  It is ours too.  It must be ours!

[4] We must have legislation that will protect the Mississippi sharecropper who is put off of his farm because he dares to register to vote.  We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation.  We need a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns five dollars a week in a home of a family whose total income is $100,000 a year.  We must have a good FEPC bill.

[5] My friends, let us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution.  By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation.  There are exceptions, of course.  We salute those.  But what political leader can stand up and say, “My party is the party of principles”?  For the party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland.  The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater.  Where is our party?  Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington?

[6] Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham?  Where is the political party that will protect the citizens of Albany, Georgia?  Do you know that in Albany, Georgia, nine of our leaders have been indicted, not by the Dixiecrats, but by the federal government for peaceful protest?  But what did the federal government do when Albany’s deputy sheriff beat Attorney C.B. King and left him half-dead?  What did the federal government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King, and she lost her baby?

[7] To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we have long said that we cannot be patient.  We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now!  We are tired.  We are tired of being beaten by policemen.  We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again.  And then you holler, “Be patient.”  How long can we be patient?  We want our freedom and we want it now.  We do not want to go to jail.  But we will go to jail if this is the price we must pay for love, brotherhood, and true peace.

[8] I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation.  Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete.  We must get in this revolution and complete the revolution.  For in the Delta in Mississippi, in southwest Georgia, in the Black Belt of Alabama, in Harlem, in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and all over this nation, the black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom.

[9] They’re talking about slow down and stop.  We will not stop.  All of the forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace, and Thurmond will not stop this revolution.  If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington.  We will march through the South; through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham.  But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.  By the force of our demands, our determination, and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy.  We must say: “Wake up America!  Wake up!”  For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.

Bibliographic List of Sources:

Lewis, John. “Speech at the March on Washington.” 28 August 1963.  Video recording received from the office of Representative John Lewis. [=A]

Lewis, John. “Text of Speech to be Delivered at Lincoln Memorial.”  28 August 1963. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, Martin Luther King, Jr. Library and Archives. [=B]

SOURCE: http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/lewis-speech-at-the-march-on-washington-speech-text/