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TI: Let's go back to the very beginning when you got involved with redress. And can you describe how you, yeah, how you came about getting involved? I mean, what motivated you to get involved with the redress movement?

WH: Well, there were a couple of things. In 1970, the JACL had its national convention in Chicago, and I attended that. And we had formed a second chapter in Chicago, it was called the Chicago Liberation Chapter. [Laughs] And we got our credentials so we could actually be a part of the convention, official part of the convention. But we were, we formed a caucus, and we called the caucus the National Liberation Caucus. So you could see a lot of the, you know, the earmarks of the anti-Vietnam war. And the Liberation Caucus confronted the JACL with a bunch of things. They weren't that far out. My thing was just to get rid of some of the things that were in the constitution about the way they conducted meetings. Getting rid of, for example, proxy voting, which is very poor practice. Because proxies don't know what's going on inside the council meetings, they don't hear any of the arguments or anything. It should be one delegate, one vote. And there were some interesting things that happened during the convention that were interesting. People didn't understand parliamentary procedure. You know, somebody would make a motion and somebody would get up and be very angry and say, "Well, that's not what he agreed to before." And I said, "Oh, no, you don't have to fight, just amend, just get up and amend the resolution." And they would make an amendment and the amendment would pass and the guy who made the thing was just sort of dumbfounded. [Laughs] I said, "Just make an amendment." I wasn't involved in the issue, you know, I just said, "Just make an amendment." So they make an amendment and the amendment passed and everyone said, "Oh, gee." But they didn't understand a lot of parliamentary procedure, and I thought that was real interesting. But that was the convention at which Edison Uno read the California-Nevada Resolution on some sort of reparations. I didn't remember. I heard about it and I heard it, but it didn't register very much.

And then... but one of the things that caused this group to coalesce was that we were all part of the movement to repeal Title II. And that group was largely in Chicago anyway. You have to be very careful of the story because people keep saying it's JACL-run, but it wasn't really JACL-run. In Chicago it was almost entirely non-JACL, even though the Chicago JACL Chapter takes credit for it. 'Cause I know how the Board of Directors were selected from an existing committee, The Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights in Chicago, they loaned us their board of directors so we'd have a board. It was not a functioning board, but just so on paper we could have a board. They loaned us their fund appeal list, their membership list, so we could do fund appeal and we didn't get any money from any Japanese Americans, except one. And so the whole thing was being run in Chicago from the Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, and JACL was not anywhere to be seen. And nationally, the thing was run, the national version of The Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights was also part of the national movement, they helped the national movement. The national movement was, from the Japanese American side was, was run by Ray Okamura and Bob Suzuki and Edison Uno, and so forth. So that formed sort of the core of this group.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.