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BN: I'm wondering how you came to be involved. I mean, you said that you were asked to take this position, but how were you identified as someone who was interested in this? Were you active in JACL before? How did that come about?

BS: Well, we were involved in a lot of activities during that... that was the time when the Asian American Movement came to fruition. And so I can't remember exactly why I got involved except the fact that my past experience in the camps, and in that speech I gave in Berkeley, that all influenced me in terms of motivating me to get involved in that. I remember, I don't know if you knew Jeff Matsui, who used to be the regional director of the JACL. I remember sitting in his office with some other guys and talking about the Title II campaign which started in northern California.

KU: Edison Uno.

BS: Yeah, right. And Jeff looked at me and said, "Why don't you get involved? Why don't you direct this campaign?" And so I was put on the spot right then and there, and said, "Okay, I'll do it." And that's how I got involved, but there were a lot of other things that were influencing me at the time. But I also became involved in the desegregation of the Pasadena Public Schools, because that was the first non-Southern school district to be court-ordered to be desegregated. And so I was appointed to that committee, the advisory committee for the desegregation, and I was elected as the vice-chair of that committee. And I visited a lot of schools during that period of time, and became more and more interested in education as part of my efforts. And I discovered, while I was involved with that committee, that the funding for the effort at desegregation was through the Emergency School Assistance Program or ESAP, and that legislation said that about fifty percent of the people hired by the program had to be blacks, Hispanics, or Native Americans, (but) mentioned nothing about Asian Americans, and the other fifty percent could be whites. And so I said, "Look, where do Asian Americans fit into this whole picture, because they're neither white nor minority according to this legislation?" That's when I wrote to the Department of (HEW ) at the time, and that's why I had those documents I gave to you were my letter to (HEW) and to Mo Morimoto, then a presidential assistant to Nixon in the White House, and asked that Asian Americans be specifically designated as a protected minority under affirmative action. So that's one of the major activities I got involved in during that period of time. But there were many other activities we were involved in. That's also when I asked Bob Nakamura to get involved developing that exhibit on the camps, which made its rounds to a lot of other places.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.