Japanese-American community leaders are gearing up to commemorate 30 years this week since their activism prompted an official apology from Washington for their wartime incarceration.
On Saturday in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, the Japanese American National Museum and Go for Broke, an educational center that teaches about the Japanese Americans who served with the United States Army in World War II despite their families' incarceration, will hold a number of talks and exhibits to remember the government's apology for a presidential executive order that incarcerated 120,000 Americans of Japanese origin amid hysteria over the war.
The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the result of tireless community activism in Los Angeles and across the country, offered a blueprint for other American communities seeking justice, says Mitchell Maki, the director of Go for Broke and co-author of the book Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress. "There are specific examples in which the Civil Liberties Act from the Japanese-American redress movement served as an exemplar for other communities," Maki says. These include Florida's 1994 recognition and reparations over the 1923 Rosewood Massacre, in which white supremacists slaughtered an entire community of black Floridians; and Congress' 1993 Apology Resolution for the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom that decimated much of the indigenous civilization there.
[For more on this story by MASSOUD HAYOUN, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...ity-in-the-trump-era]
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