<Begin Segment 5>

LH: What were some of the other difficulties in getting people involved in redress besides their early reluctance in terms of...

FH: The main, main problem is trying to get them interested. At that time a lot of people wouldn't join JACL. There were some that blamed JACL for evacuation, and some just didn't like JACL and they wouldn't join. But when prospects became better and better that there might be a $20,000 or whatever award, they became interested. It's just like when during evacuation time before Pearl Harbor you couldn't get very many people interested in JACL, but after Pearl Harbor they figured well, maybe JACL can do something for me in terms of evacuation and internment, then they all started to join again. So it was self-interest I think mostly.

LH: Well, and reflecting back in some of things that have been said in the conference, how do you view... I think the way that a lot of people characterized JACL during the conference was sort of as one big organization. But clearly there were all these smaller organizations, smaller chapters of JACL which had different agendas and had different problems that they had to encounter through the redress movement. What made the central California JACL sort of face different problems that were different from the Bay area, say, or from Los Angeles?

FH: Do you know, like the N double-RP, or NCRR? Their main strength is in the urban areas like San Francisco and Los Angeles. Because in Fresno we never heard of, nobody ever came from that outfit to Fresno. And the Fresno chapter did everything. The Fresno chapter and the so-called Central California District Council, we had about nine chapters there. And we did the things that NCRR, that they did, we did that ourselves. We didn't have to have them do it. So that's why I say, in terms of importance, if a person had to choose between NCRR and Japanese American Citizens League, I think they would choose JACL, because JACL is a bigger organization, they're more organized and they were doing all the things that NCRR claimed that they were doing. We were writing letters and we had every one of the legislative persons out of our area, we had them on our side. We'd go to their fundraising things and we'd talk to them, and we knew some of them personally. And so we had 'em all on our side anyway. So I think central California did a good job.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.