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BN: Now, you famously gave a very powerful testimony at the commission hearings in 1981. Had you been involved with the, kind of, redress movement activities prior to that?

AM: Kind of on the fringes. But when it started, like I was able to have some of the meetings at Whittier College. In fact, Whittier College had a conference on the camps, it was one of the early ones, and we had a number of scholars and people who hadn't... Don Nakanishi and the author of Farewell to Manzanar.

BN: Jeanne Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.

AM: Yes. So in different ways, I think being at Whittier allowed me to connect with them and support them. The group that... I wish I weren't forgetting names. I wasn't that active in NCRR, but what's the group that was trying to do the class action suit?

BN: Oh, yeah, NCJAR.

AM: Yeah. I was involved with them, too. Also, Gordon Hirabayashi was at the University of Washington, and there the Nisei student advisor was a man named Bob O'Brien who was the head of the sociology department at Whittier College for many years. And he retired the year that I got there, and so he was writing a book, he was revising his dissertation on the college Nisei, and he asked me to help him with it. And I was not into research, I was not into writing books, and I said, "Oh, I can't do that." But he was a very smart man, and he came to me with a list of all the students and the Nisei Student Union, and what do you know, my brothers and my sister were in there. So Gordon would come and visit with him when he would come to Southern California, and so I heard what Gordon was doing, and people asking him to speak up and do things. So in kind of funny little ways, I got connected.

BN: Kind of all the different aspects of redress. And then around that time, you also wrote one of the first articles on the psychological effects, impacts of incarceration.

AM: I think that was because, well, I think social work was recognizing that we don't really serve minorities, and they wanted to know more about it. So I wrote several articles and chapters and books and things talking about it. It was very interesting to me, I think my first article was in social casework back in 1976, and then we had a social work meeting, where those of us who had chapters in that book spoke about our particular group. And it's the first time, it turned out, that I was speaking out loud to an audience. I had written things, I had talked to people individually, but I never said these things in public. And at one point, I just couldn't talk anymore, and I was filled with tears and such. So after that, after the meeting, my friends, like maybe half a dozen friends, came running up and seeing if I was okay. But it really told me how deep and painful those feelings were, that it's not something that we can just toss off easily. And I thought of that when I saw the Tales of Glamour. The people who didn't want to talk really didn't want to talk, it was just too painful.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.