Tag Archives: internment

Memorial for Colo. Gov. Ralph Carr dedicated

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Ralph Carr memorial dedicated at Kenosha Pass on Hwy 285, reamed Ralph Carr Memorial Highway

Ralph Carr, the man who served as governor of Colorado at the start of World War II, had been largely forgotten for decades. But thanks to an effort by the Asian Pacific Bar Association (APABA) and a biography by journalist Adam Schrager, Carr’s making a comeback in Colorado, and his legacy is finally getting its due, with a fine biography, a stretch of Highway 285 named in his honor, and now, a memorial to Carr’s legacy at Kenosha Pass.

On December 12, representatives of Denver’s Japanese American community, APABA, and CDOT assembled at a scenic overlook just a few hundred feet west of the Kenosha Pass summit on Highway 285 to dedicate the memorial. (Here’s a nice report from the Canyon Courier about the dedication.)

It’s a massive stone tribute engraved with a message that explains the significance of Ralph Carr to Colorado.

A rising star in the Republican Party during the 1930s, Carr was mentioned as a future presidential candidate when he famously became the only Western governor in the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor to oppose first the harassment, and then the internment of Japanese Americans.
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Meet Adam Schrager, author of “The Principled Politician”

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The Principled Politician: The Ralph Carr Story," is a biography of Colorado governor Ralph CarrErin and I are trying something different from our visualizAsian.com interviews with Asian Americans, and hosting a conversation with our friend Adam Schrager, the author of “The Principled Politician: The Ralph Carr Story.”

The interview is scheduled for Wednesday, February 24 at 6 pm PT (7 pm MT, 9 pm ET), and like our other talks, it’s a free call held over a conference line and webcast, so you can listen via phone (long distance charges may apply) or online (free). Just register for the call, and you can also submit questions both before and during the interview on the webcast page, and we’ll pass them along to Adam.

This is a good time to revisit Adam’s excellent biography of Ralph Carr, which was published in 2008. The paperback edition has just been released, and Day of Remembrance is coming up on February 19.

OK, you say, what’s Day of Remembrance, and who’s Ralph Carr, anyway? Continue reading →

Japanese Americans sent to internment camps while at University of California finally get diplomas

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Photograph of Yoshiaki Noguchi when he was on the Polytechnic High School 1940 track team, courtesy of the Noguchi family.This past summer, the University of California announced it would award diplomas to Japanese Americans who had been students at one of the school’s four campuses at the time, but had their education disrupted by World War II and the internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast.

About 700 students of Japanese ancestry were enrolled at the University of California at the time of internment, when they and their families were uprooted and sent to concentration camps scattered within barren parts of the American interior. Some graduated that year, in 1942, with the aid of sympathetic faculty and administrators. Some returned to graduate after the War. And some eventually obtained degrees at other universities.

But many never completed their educations.

So the Cal system did the right thing and decided to award these students honorary diplomas. Out of the 700, about 400 are set to receive honorary degrees this winter and next spring. The Associated Press sent out a perfunctory, four-paragraph news article about the diplomas over its wire service, which no doubt many news outlets picked up and published. But the real story that needs to be shared is the human one, and some news outlets have been tracking down former students and capturing their quotes. I was particularly moved by one story where the student is no longer able to give a quote.

At UC-Berkeley last weekend, 42 former students received their degrees, and the event was captured in an eloquent and moving article, “Emotional day as UC-Berkeley awards honorary degrees to former internees,” written by Sharon Noguchi, a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News. Her story does what few newspaper journalists can accomplish: It balances accurate, unbiased reporting with a poignant personal narrative.

It turns out that her father, Yoshiaki Noguchi (photo at top as a track athlete at Polytechnic High School in 1940, courtesy of the Noguchi family), was one of those students who never got to graduate from UC-Berkeley. His degree was accepted by her mother, because he passed away more than 20 years ago, without even hearing the U.S. government’s official apology for internment which was passed by Congress in 1988. Continue reading →

Next on visualizAsian.com: Dale Minami, rock star of AAPI attorneys who took on Supreme Court… and won

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Attorney Dale MinamiThe next interview scheduled for Erin and my visualizAsian.com project is one close to our hearts. The free, live interview on Tuesday, August 25 at 6 PM PT (9 PM ET) will be with with Japanese American attorney Dale Minami.

Dale is a rock star within the AAPI community — in fact, the entire U.S. legal community — as the lead attorney in Korematsu v United States, the landmark case that cleared the name of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American who resisted being sent to internment camps during WWII and was sent to prison. A 1944 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision established the constitutionality of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. But Dale and a team of young pro-bono lawyers took on the case and in 1983, got Korematsu’s conviction overturned.

He’s most famous for the Korematsu case, which he won on a writ of coram nobis, a legal tactic that forced the court to admit that an error of “fundamental character” had been made in Korematsu’s conviction.

Here’s a must-see video about Dale made for an award ceremony when he received the UC-Berkeley law school’s highest honor:

But Dale has been fighting for the AAPI community all his career.

He filed the first class-action lawsuit over employment by AAPIs on behalf of AAPIs with United Pilipinos for Affirmative Action v. California Blue Shield, and he helped the Spokane chapter of the JACL take on Washington State University with a class action suit to establish an Asian American Studies program. He also led a fight against UCLA over tenure that was denied an Asian American professor that revealed the layers of discrimination in the academic community. Continue reading →

Digging up the past at the Amache internment camp

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The JANM conference that starts today in Denver has a whole bunch of interesting and important panels, workshops and discussions. I’m moderating one on Saturday, about Hapas — mixed-race Asian Americans. But some of the most powerful parts of the conference will be the ones that bring people together with their past.

Today and Sunday, caravans of buses will be taking conference attendees to southeast Colorado, to the Amache concentration camp near the town of Granada (the official name of the camp was Granada Relocation Center) where more than 7,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.

Erin and I will be hosting one of the buses on Sunday. The day will begin at 6am and we’ll return in the evening — the drive to the camp takes about 3 1/2 hours through desolate eastern plains terrain.

I’ll blog about the trip afterwards, but I wanted to share a couple of links about Amache:
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