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Randy
SFN Regular
USA
1990 Posts |
 Posted - 01/06/2012 : 22:44:38
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Just passing along a rather powerful story. I look forward to reading more about this extraordinary man...
....snip, from the article:
Hirabayashi resisted a government policy that treated people of Japanese descent as second-class citizens with fewer rights. He was a 24-year-old student at University of Washington when he defied an executive order from President Franklin Roosevelt that mandated an 8 p.m. curfew for all people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast. The curfew was a precursor to the roundup of 120,000 Japanese-Americans and legal residents for transportation to internment camps.
Hirabayashi, an American citizen, intentionally violated the curfew and turned himself in to the FBI. He was arrested, convicted and sentenced to serve 90 days in a prison camp in Arizona. However, the local government told him that they lacked the money to transport him there from Washington state. Intent on serving his time, Hirabayashi hitchhiked to the facility instead.
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"We are all connected; to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the rest of the universe atomically."
"So you're made of detritus [from exploded stars]. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?"
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 01/12/2012 : 00:24:01 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Randy
Just passing along a rather powerful story. I look forward to reading more about this extraordinary man...
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As a boy growing up in the early 1950's in San Diego's then-semi-rural Encanto neighborhood, almost all my neighbors were Japanese American vegetable farmers. I learned to respect them greatly. The fathers in the families adjacent to our home were the Ito brothers, who had fought against the Nazis with the wildly heroic 442nd Regimental Combat Team in WWII (the unit received 21 Medals of Honor). The Ito boys had volunteered to fight for the US despite being, along with their families, confined to internment camps solely on the basis of their ancestry.
To me, both my Ito neighbors and Mr. Hirabayashi were true American heroes, each in their own way. |
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 01/12/2012 00:32:13 |
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Japanese-American civil rights hero In America
