<Begin Segment 25>

TI: You mentioned while you were in Nebraska you worked with the black community, and I think there was the incident that I'm aware of in terms of your efforts to desegregate a swimming pool. Can you tell me that story and how that happened?

JI: Well, I was doing playground work for the city.

TI: And what city? Is this Lincoln?

JI: Lincoln. And before they changed the pool, changed the water in the pool, they let kids swim free. And when I went to the city hall to get the tickets to pass around, they said, "Don't give any tickets to the black children," or, "the colored children," they said. "Colored" was an accepted word at that time. So I said, "Well, you'd better keep them all. I'm not going to sneak around and hand out tickets here and there and pass up others." And the more I thought about it, the madder I got. And so I decided I would resign, and I sent in a letter of resignation and sent a letter, sent a copy to all the playground directors in the city. The only guy who quit was a guy who worked with me who was black, and a veteran who had had white troops under him and so forth, and he was an angry person, so he was even angrier than I was, to the point where he couldn't rationalize. He would have been a great Black Panther if the Black Panther movement had been present, but it wasn't. As a matter of fact, blacks were fairly passive at that time. And anyway, nothing was happening, so I decided I'd go to the city hall and talk to them at a city council meeting. And they, I said, "You're in violation of the state statute." Well, first of all, I got some kids together, there was a guy in graduate, taking graduate college who was a professor at Southern University in Louisiana, which is the black part of LSU at that time. And he came with me, and we tried to get into the swimming pool, and they wouldn't let him in. So I got, I just wanted to make a test. And so I went to the city council and said, "You're in violation of state statute," they had a very good state statute that wasn't enforced, but they had a very good, very specific statute from, from way back. And the upshot was that they said, "Not one black has asked for, or not one colored person has asked for what you're asking for." And they said, "Would you be happy if they, if we made a swimming pool in the colored neighborhood?" And I said, "No, that's not, that's still in violation of your statute." And they said, "Not one colored person has asked for what you're asking for."

So I went to the Urban League, and I was active with the NAACP anyway, so I went to them and told them what was happening, and went to some of the black preachers. And I knew the Urban League person because they'd asked me to come talk to career day or something, to some of their kids. And so I, anyway, we, their city hall will seat maybe two hundred people, and we had over two hundred people there, at least half of them black. And other people were very helpful were some veterans coming back from the war, American Veterans Committee, they were very, kind of answered to the American Legion, very liberal group. And so they had no choice but to open the swimming pool. And then a cold spell set in, so nobody went to the swimming pool. And the guy tried to, the playground director tried to blame it on the fact that they had opened the swimming pool, and so I got a friend of mine, one of the AVC guys who went down and did some research on temperature tables and we gave them all these temperature tables, told them that was probably the reason. And anyway, it stayed open after that, but you know, it was not a big thing. It seemed big at the time, and in a way it was kind of a defining moment for me. That and the time when I tried to get Norman Thomas on the ballot in Nebraska, which is impossible to get a third-party candidate 'cause of the numbers that you're required, just impossible. But the upshot of it was that the guy who was in charge was a banker -- in charge of the recreation committee -- was a banker whom I thought was a friend of mine, 'cause he was active in the Nebraska Art Association and we would chat about things. And he tried to get me fired.

TI: Because of your connection to Norman Thomas?

JI: No, because of having -- no, they didn't care about what my politics were.

TI: But the desegregation?

JI: Yeah. They're a conservative state, but they're generally laissez faire people. No, because he was the recreation committee, and he felt that this was a slap at him, and he tried to get me fired. In the meantime, I'm in trouble at the university because the, Duard Laging, who had come in as chairman of the department, kept trying to act as though I was working for him, and I was doing things independently of him. And so I -- oh, and students were up in arms against him for things he had done, and they would come to me. I don't know why people always talk to me, but they came to me, and so I started writing letters to the president and all that, and at one time I see the president walking across campus and he says, "Ishikawa, I'm disappointed in you." I said, "I can't help it, this is what's happening, and Laging shouldn't be there." But he was a new president, he came from Michigan State, and Laging had come from Michigan State, so it was a pretty hard combination to knock down, and he didn't want to get involved with that. And I probably would have been fired on the spot, except for the fact that the banker wanted to get me fired, and he wasn't going to let an influential alum tell him what to do. [Laughs]

TI: Oh, so interesting. So in some ways --

JI: So I was saved. It was, it was a crazy situation all the way around. Fortunately, I was able to get another job. Oh, another thing that I would have probably gotten into trouble with the university was they were trying to pass a loyalty oath. This was during McArthur... McCarthy group, and at a faculty meeting, I said, "Any communists among us will be very happy to sign that. They have no ethical sense of perjury, and they would be very happy to sign, but I won't sign it because I think it's so manifestly unfair, and also ineffective. I don't think it would be an effective means." And so the only thing they would have done, they wouldn't, they couldn't fire you, they could withhold your salary. So that's, but anyway, I would probably have gotten in trouble with that if I had stayed at Nebraska.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.