<Begin Segment 4>

AI: Well, let me ask you then, moving ahead a little bit farther in time, when you left camp, you went and first worked for the family and helping out with the wedding of the daughter, then you went to Michigan and assisted the elderly parents for a short while before then going to Milwaukee-Downer. And in our last interview session, you were talking about Milwaukee-Downer as being somewhat an elite private college for the daughters of the more wealthy families.

EH: But you know, in those days, colleges were desperate for enrollment because all the men had gone to the war front or taken, or other people took factory jobs because, you know, the pay was so much greater. So... I think it's interesting that, I think, even the most conservative of colleges eagerly enrolled... you know, people from, Niseis from, from the camps. I don't know whether I mentioned the fact that before an agency called Student Relocation was established by the Quakers, we were writing individual application letters because we wou-, somehow we would gather catalogues, just writing and they would send us catalogues, and we put those in a kind of a barrack bungalow, you know, small room, and we shared the information. And I wrote to, I think a Jefferson University in Missouri, and I got this letter -- did I mention that? I got this letter from, a very good letter from the college saying, "Thank you for your application. We're pleased that you are interested. But I don't think, we don't think you want to come here, this is a Negro men's college." And see, at that time, before the war, I don't think we were even aware that, how much segregation was intact and we never heard about "Negro colleges" for one thing. So that was astounding. And then you began to realize, then shortly, it was shortly after that that Student Relocation got established because I know that they handled my transcript. At the time I was leaving, even, Student Relocation was operating.

AI: Well, once you got to Milwaukee-Downer -- I think I didn't ask this the last time -- was, did you have an impression there that you and the other Nisei women were in any way equal to the white American women who were there?

EH: Well, I think, I think we were treated well and equal, though probably looking at us with a little bit of curiosity or stigma. A, you know, I told you about a Judy Johnson whose father happened to work in the Chicago relocation office, white, they were from Oak Park or somewhere just outside of Chicago. And she came up to me in a very friendly gesture and said, "What camp did you come from?" And I was startled that a Caucasian gal would know this and then she told me that her father worked at the relocation office, and so... that, that was a very -- that kind of experience was very precious, and heart-warming. But nobody else was much interested, I don't know that my, any of the dorm-mates, for instance, asked. And I told you about my dorm, dorm-mate was furious at me that I would talk to Judy Johnson about relocation camp, because she... because she was born in Japan and wasn't eligible for citizenship. She was kind of, for her, it was a psychological, big psychological problem 'cause she didn't feel like she had the same privileges that even Niseis did, but you know, there she was, in a good school.

In a sociology class, the teacher, the professor got sick, and we were getting a rotation of substitute profs, and... we had a woman who was a Tennessean and kind of had a southern drawl, and so she was testing, Gunna Merdle's book came out; it was a very significant sociological book on race. Probably one of the first major ones, and he, this came out of Sweden. And we were, we were having to read out of that, I don't know that we all had copies of it, but anyway, she was using that as a basis, and saying, asking us, for instance, would we have accepted Negro students at Milwaukee-Downer. And, and then she went into a general declaration kind of thing, and said, "How many of you would allow Negro students in the dorm?" And invariably I was the only one that would stand up with any of these questions, and I think at that time maybe Niseis weren't even ready to do that. It depended on the person. But it was an eye-opener for me because -- and of course I had that good experience at, as the spark, at the Student YM/YW when the black kids from Chicago, you know... I was in the room with them, and they would ask me a little bit about the camp, but gee, they were young kids, here I was eighteen, nineteen, and they were just out of high school, but I was amazed at their forthrightness. 'Course, by that time, the black population really had some belligerent, impatient attitudes built in. But I don't think we ever had, in Chicago, I mean, in Sacramento, we never had that kind of occasion. Lincoln School did have probably a dozen... in fact, in my ninth grade graduating class, I think there were three or four black kids. One of the black families -- and I never remember their last name -- was a boy, Roy, and his sister, Shirley, was another one that Ida J. North, the music teacher in Lincoln Junior High School, who had prepared Fumiko Yabe to be a beautiful vocalist, also did the same thing with Shir-, this girl Shirley. She just lived right behind us. We were on T and she was on S Street. I never really got acquainted with her, but we knew of her reputation because Lincoln, Lincoln School, because we had the stretch from kindergarten to ninth grade... performances, or programs that went on in the auditorium, very often we got a chance to see older kids perform. Not just limited to elementary school. So in that way, the integration issue, I think, never was a major problem, but it's true that we probably wouldn't have dated a black.

AI: In, in your Sacramento days?

EH: In Sacramento. (Yes), I mean... I think... we probably weren't prohibited, maybe some people were, but it just, it just, socializing just never occurred. It would have been interesting to have the YW provide that kind of experience. But they did do, we had a YWCA staff person talk about, came on a special program and talked about race relations and discrimination, but that was a very brief -- the other time I heard that, I think, was one of our older Nisei, I can't remember whether that was from, from a sermon, a pulpit, but this guy went into the ministry, became a Presbyterian minister, and he was another one that introduced discrimination and race relations. I can't remember whether that was a sermon or whether he was a Christian Endeavor speaker, but that was another -- you know, it's kind of interesting 'cause I looked back at it and almost could count on my fingers the time I heard these, these words. I'm not sure that, I'm not sure that we ever discussed it that much except, except in terms of employment discrimination. Even in my senior year, I had classmates who were rushing off to dime store after-school jobs, and my reaction was jeepers, we needed those jobs more than they did. How come we can't qualify, how come we can't get hired? We knew we couldn't get hired. There was no such thing as an Asian clerk in any downtown store.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.