<Begin Segment 26>
MN: Still, in 1969, you were involved with the Manzanar Pilgrimage as we know it today. How did you get involved in this?
Mo N: Well, like I say, we had organized all over the place, and Oriental Concerns, and the whole thing about civil rights and the Panthers, models were playing out there, so people were doing work all over the place, on campus and in the community. So we were holding a whole series of meetings to talk about, "Where are we going? What are we all about?" And this had gone on for quite a while, every weekend we'd have to argue our ass off. So it was pretty much figured, concluded that, "Let's do something practical that we can all get behind and do." And that's what, at that time, then this guy Jeffrey Matsui of the JACL had hired Victor Shibata and Warren Furutani as youth workers for the JACL, follow up on that 'Are You Yellow' stuff. And so they were going around speaking to different people, so they had a lot of travel kind of freedoms that most people didn't have. So one of the things that they looked up and found was Manzanar. And here was a concentration camp less than two hundred, three hundred miles from L.A. that a lot of L.A. people had gone to, and then there was this reverend that was going there every year since the camp closed down. So that inspired everybody, so that's when they decided, we decided as a group that, "Okay, let's do that." 'Cause that would go, everything that had been pushed down our throat. Forget the war, forget about camps, try to be American, try to be white, all of those things.
<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.