RESISTANCE, RESETTLEMENT, AND REDRESS.

• Author: Abe, Frank
• Position: Symposium on the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Year of Executive Order 9066

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. RESETTLEMENT: THE HOUGH DISTRICT II. RESISTANCE: "WE HEREBY REFUSE" III. REDRESS: "AN ISSUE FOR ALL AMERICANS" IV. EXECUTIVE ORDER 13,780: A MORAL RESPONSIBILITY INTRODUCTION

The opportunity to speak at Case Western Reserve on the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 (1) was one I could not resist. It brought me full circle to examining the consequences of that Presidential edict on the course of my own life, which I've devoted to documenting the resistance to incarceration and helping secure redress for that injustice.

I was born in October 1951 just a block away from the Western Reserve campus, at what is now MacDonald Women's Hospital. And while I was incapable of knowing it at the time, my very presence in Cleveland was no accident: it was a direct result of President Roosevelt's reaction to fear and war hysteria with the racial exclusion of 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and their incarceration in American concentration camps, followed by the US Supreme Court ruling on the habeas corpus case of a clerical worker from Sacramento that compelled the closure of those camps.

Well-documented in these pages are the legal and political foundations of that executive order. Bending the arc of Japanese American history toward justice, however, would take a generation.

1. RESETTLEMENT: THE HOUGH DISTRICT

   Mind you, I'm not at all complaining about being born in Cleveland. It was an innocent and reasonably happy childhood. My whole world revolved around the handful of other families who had been incarcerated during the war and who resettled after the war in the Hough district. The Supreme Court ruling in the case of Mitsuye Endo (2) in December 1944 forced the civilian War Relocation Authority to scramble to empty out the ten concentration camps it had just as rapidly built in 1942, and to resettle tens of thousands who could not or would not return to the West Coast in the East and Midwest. The agency moved about 3,500 of us to Cleveland, the fourth-largest center of postwar resettlement after Chicago, Denver, and New York City. (3) My parents joined a number of other Nisei--second-generation Japanese Americans--in settling near East 79th and Hough, one of the few places where apartments could be found during the postwar housing shortage. (4) After I came along, we moved to a three-story boarding house at 1899 East 81st Street, straight across from the Cleveland Buddhist Church.

   Ours was a tiny enclave on both sides of East 81st that extended no more than a half-block between Chester and Hough Avenues, anchored by the presence of the Buddhist Church--a "rather ordinary looking house" from the outside but one filled inside with dark mahogany woodwork and the bustle of Sunday School activity. (5) The War Relocation Authority connected my father to a job at what I knew only as some kind of factory. I accompanied my mother as she cleaned the rooms of the boarders on our second floor. I was sent to Hough Elementary School on East 89th Street, then to the newly-built Crispus Attucks Elementary School on East 71st, progressively named after the African American believed to be the first American killed in the American Revolution. There were picnics in Rocky River, excursions in the spring to see the cherry blossoms in downtown parks, and trips to the amusement park at Euclid Beach. At Municipal Stadium, I learned how to score baseball games watching the Cleveland Indians.

   At the start of World War II only around twenty-five Japanese Americans lived in Cleveland, most of them servants and houseboys, (6) and in 1950 the Hough district was still a mostly white, middle-class community. (7) By 1960, however, the racial makeup reversed to nearly three-quarters African American. (8) In our own version of white flight, my playmates were moving east to suburban homes in far-away places with names like Willoughby, Willowick, and Wickliffe. After a break-in at the home of an older couple across the street, we left too. In 1961 my father moved my mother, sister, brother and I to a suburb in the Santa Clara Valley of California, in what is now known as Silicon Valley. After we'd left, four people were killed and 240 fires were set during the Hough race riots of July 1966, which was ignited at the former hub of the Japanese community at 79th and Hough. The Buddhist Church was firebombed, reportedly in August 1968. (9) The church building survived, but at some point, our boarding house was burned to the ground.

2. RESISTANCE: "WE HEREBY REFUSE"

   As an adolescent in California, I accepted my pre-history in Cleveland and our reasons for leaving as a natural part of our family narrative. Cleveland was the place of my birth, but over time I came to understand that the West Coast was our "psychological homeland." (10) Over time I learned that my mother was born in San Jose, and that my father had originally worked in the fruit orchards of nearby Berryessa, but like most of my generation it wasn't until I was in college that I began to ask more challenging questions.

   I grasped the idea of a larger context to our family story from a book owned by every family we knew at the time, a seemingly obligatory copy of Bill Hosokawa's 1969 popular history, Nisei: The Quiet Americans. (11) Only then did I piece together that the "camp" where my father spent the war years was not some kind of benign summer camp, as he made it sound, but was in fact an American concentration camp located in the high desert of Wyoming. I learned he was actually born in Japan and sent to the U.S. on the passport of a deceased relative, and he was more or less indentured as a teenager to working for the Berryessa orchard owner. After Pearl Harbor, he was evicted and incarcerated along with every other person of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast with at...