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AI: Well, so then I, I don't think I asked you, what was it that, that intrigued you, or that caused you to take the job at the American Council on Race Relations?

EH: Well, I just, I felt like I had been at Preferred long enough, and there were other things to do, and, and that the title American Council on Race Relations was intriguing and exciting-looking. There was a Pat Shitama, who's a Seattle gal, happened to be the office secretary, or receptionist, at the resettlement committee in Chicago.

AI: Chicago Resettlers Committee?

EH: (Yes), (yes), Abe Hagiwara was directing, it was a very good, he was a very good person. But because I knew Pat, and I think maybe I met Pat at Pocatello, at the YW conference, otherwise I don't know. Anyway, Pat called me and said, "Hey, Elaine, there's a great job description coming through here. Why don't you consider it?" And she knew I would be interested. I can't remember that I'd had that kind of discussion with Pat, but I knew the Resettlers Committee was active, and I'd been there enough that I knew that they were branching out in many -- and that was a very vital organization, in Chicago. So, I feel, in many ways, I did not get back to college to graduate but I felt like, especially at American Council, I was learning more there than I would have ever had, had I stayed in school. You know, the real nitty-gritty of life -- even, even at Preferred, where we never had opportunities for white-collar jobs in, on the West Coast before the war. Just going through that routine. There was such a labor shortage, and the high schools were sending part-time workers even -- or kids who had quit school would come to apply. I really had a huge headache with incompetent high school, almost delinquents, who didn't care what happened to the files, and wouldn't file them right. They would be at the wrong desk, and it was -- we had thousands and thousands, and when a lawyer wanted a file, he had to have that file. And I'd say, "So-and-so, you had the file this morning. I know their correspondence came through." And she'd say, "Elaine, I don't know what the hell happened to that file, that was hours ago." And, you know, I went through that so much, in a couple of weeks I, "Mr. Howard, we're not having any of this. I don't have time to be disciplining sixteen-year-olders." And so those were learning experiences.

AI: Well, so when you first got to American Council on Race Relations, and you said you learned so much, and this was a period where you really found out more about the realities of race, tell me, what kinds of things did you first find out about in your early days there?

EH: Well, the fact that, and here was a sizeable agency, now, all the agencies in that building had, had mixed staff. They certainly had black staff. And Charles Johnson, who was president of Fisk, I think, was a regular, routine stopover for him, he would jump a train and come in to Chicago just to have a yak session with a couple of other professors, or the head of, Edwin Embrey was the head of Rosenwald Foundation, and just, there was just never ending what we were picking up. And the fact that I had to go through all this newspapers and magazine articles, and learn, categorize them in different sections of, of the whole issue of race, was a learning experience. I told you about Mary Sabusawa who was, had a work assignment from Antioch College and then ended up being rehired when she graduated. She was president of JACL at one point.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.