<Begin Segment 7>

BN: You mentioned throughout this time you don't know, your parents never talked about camp. What did they tell you in terms of where you were born?

AN: I just assumed Manzanar was just...

BN: You knew that you were born in a place called Manzanar.

AN: And then they would talk about camp, but I always assumed "camp" was like a, if you were to ask me, I'd say it was like an agricultural camp that my family just happened to be at. So I thought of camp as like a different kind of environment. Because we'd talk about, oh, yes, so-and-so was in Block 23, and then you're in camp. It was never put in a broader context, so no, I was born in Manzanar. I didn't even know where Manzanar was until later on. That's why it was such a shock when I saw the, first time I saw "Manzanar" in print, in a book that talked about that.

BN: Which one, what was that?

AN: I was just doing research in the stacks on another topic, and I ran across this book called Managed Casualty by John Kitsuse and I can't remember who the other person was.

BN: Leonard Bloom.

AN: Bloom, yeah. And so I can't remember what I was looking for --

BN: This is in college?

AN: This is in college.

BN: At Berkeley?

AN: At Berkeley. And so I was doing this research and then I was reading, and I can't remember what the class was, and that's when I saw this, it says, "Manzanar, one of ten relocation centers in which Japanese Americans were interned during World War II." And that's the first time I saw Manzanar. But I was busy under pressure to do the paper, but I made a mental note. So when I got home, I said, "What was Manzanar?" and they said, "That was camp." I said, "What were we doing there?" "Well, that's where they put Japanese Americans." But they didn't want to talk about it, said, "No, no, that's kind of the past." And so I kind of put that away until I graduated that year and then started to find more interests of my own. That's when, like in 1967, I started looking up things and I read, what was that? Bosworth's book. That's the first thing, I kind of looked like that.

Because at Berkeley I was involved in a lot of civil rights related things, and this just coincided with, in '66 was when I was involved in SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and it was kind of like basically this notion of, oh, yeah, this is for blacks in the South. My mentality was almost like a white person kind of supporting, "Oh, it's terrible what's happening to blacks in the South." And so it never occurred to me that I was the victim of racism per se, and that was during the time when Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, and the whole notion of Black Power emerged. And I remember going to a thing where he says, for white people, if you're really concerned, rather than organizing buses and going out, talk to your parents and your friends and get them. Black people need to organize. And I sat there and thought, "Oh." So was thinking like a white person. And then we began to understand we needed to kind of organize within our own communities, and I didn't know quite what that meant, because I wasn't white, etcetera. And then that's when I started finding out about Manzanar, and that's when ethnic studies and other things all began to coattail together. So during my graduate work at SC, that's where we started to organize these things. But my plans at SC during graduate work were pretty straightforward. I was planning on just kind of getting my masters, going on for my doctorate, but I was offered a fellowship in Washington, D.C. working for Housing and Urban Development, this relatively prestigious fellowship.

And so that's when Yvonne and I got married, because I said, "Well, I'm going to go back to Washington and spend a couple years." And she said, "Okay, have a good time." [Laughs] And I said, "You're not coming?" Goes, "Why would I come? I've got my own life." So that was kind of the plan, but fortunately I had a faculty advisor who was African American, who got a federal grant to do some work on community organizing, so that really changed my life. So I got put into what we called a Center for Social Action, it was an activist center.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.