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"The
Road to Redress and Reparations"
Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the
Civil Liberties Act of 1988 |
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Mochida family
waits for an evacuation bus in Eden Township (Hayward, CA). Photo by Dorothea Lange |
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Featured Speakers |
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Saturday,
August 9, 2008
2:00-4:00 p.m
San Jose City College Theater
2100 Moorpark Avenue,
San Jose, CA 95128
Free and open to the public
Get map
Presented
by:
San Jose
JACL
Nihonmachi Outreach Committee
San Jose City College
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Norman
Mineta
Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Secretary
of Transportation, U.S. Congressman and
Mayor of San Jose
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John Tateishi
Former JACL Executive
Director, National JACL Redress Director |
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Susan
Hayase
NOC Redress Activist
and Civil Liberties Public Education Fund
Board of Directors |
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| Although many people now view the passage of the Civil
Liberties Act of 1988 as a great civil rights victory, many
are not aware of the great barriers that were overcome in
achieving this landmark legislation: a Japanese American
population that accounted for just 0.3 percent of the U.S.
population and had little political representation, a
presumably unsympathetic Republican president and a
Republican-controlled Senate, soaring deficits that made
people leery of monetary reparations, and opposition from an
array of groups and organizations. Even within the
Japanese American community, there was not unanimous support
of redress and the organizations and individuals that did
support the redress movement did not always agree, and at
times bickered, on strategy.
Twenty years later, many in the San
Jose community can reflect on the different aspects of
redress: what does it all mean to us today, did we fully
acknowledge the great injustice for all internees, how did
it change our community, have people changed their minds
about the legislation, what did it take to get the
legislation to pass? This program will explore the efforts
undertaken at the local, national and congressional levels
that culminated in the passage of this legislation and its
significance.
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Panama Canal Zone: Japanese Peruvians en route to
U.S. Internment Camps. April 2, 1942. U.S. Army
Signal Corps Photo. National Archive. |
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Campaign for Justice
Redress Now for Japanese Latin Americans
For more info:
www.campaignforjusticejla.org
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The Civil Liberties
Act of 1988 that had found that the Internment was the product of
race hatred, wartime hysteria and a failure of political leadership,
nonetheless did not offer redress to other victims of U.S. wartime
policies: the thousands of Japanese Latin Americans our nation had
kidnapped from countries throughout the Caribbean and Central and
South America and interned in U.S. prison camps to be used as barter
for American prisoner exchanges. |
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| From December 1941 to February 1948, the U.S.
government orchestrated and financed the mass abduction, forcible
deportation and internment of 2,264 men, women, and children of
Japanese ancestry from 13 Latin American countries. Stripped of
their passports en route to the U.S. These Japanese Latin Americans
(JLAs) were declared “illegal aliens”. Over 800 JLAs were
included in two prisoner of war exchanges between the U.S. and
Japan. The remaining JLAs were imprisoned without due process of law
in U.S. Department of Justice internment camps until after the end
of the war. Since many were initially barred from returning to their
home countries, more than 900 JLAs were deported to a war devastated
Japan.
NOC strongly supports efforts to
acknowledge and redress the fundamental injustices suffered by JLAs
during WWII. H.R. 662, the "Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Latin Americans of Japanese Descent
Act," is at a critical stage and the establishment of a hearing is
being contemplated within a House Judiciary Subcommittee chaired by
U.S. Congresswoman, Zoe Lofgren. For more information on what you can do
to support this effort, visit the
Campaign for Justice website (http://www.campaignforjusticejla.org). |
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The initiative to pass a
constitutional amendment, intended to ban marriage for
same-sex couples in California, has qualified for the
November ballot. It's time
for all of us who believe that LGBT rights are basic human
rights to make a stand to preserve the rights
that were gained by the recent California Supreme Court
decision. For more information on what you can do, visit the
Equality For All information page:
http://www.equalityforall.com/home.php.
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San Jose Nihonmachi
Outreach Committee (NOC)
P.O. Box 2293, San Jose, CA 95109
E-Mail:
info@sjnoc.org
Website:
www.sjnoc.org
"In the End, we will remember not the words of our
enemies, but the silence of our friends."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. |
