Densho Digital Repository - Sharon Maeda Interview (Densho ID: ddr-densho-529-6)

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BY: So I'm assuming that the schools that you attended, first in Portland and then in Seattle, reflected the neighborhoods. In other words, were the schools that you attended in Portland, more diverse than the schools you attended in school? What was the diversity of your schools like?

SM: Well, the school, the elementary school in Portland was black and white, but I did not understand until I was an education major at the University of Washington about tracking. So I was always first grade, second grade, third grade, like that. I was always in a class with all-white kids except for two Black kids, and it was the same two Black kids. And what I later learned with this tracking is, because we could read before we got to school, we got put in with the white kids in the, quote, "smart class," and all the other Black kids on our block in and in the neighborhood, they were in another class. And we never ended up in the same class, and we kept thinking, "Oh, maybe next year we'll be in the same class," but no, they had us tracked.

BY: And how about in Seattle? What were the schools in Seattle like in terms of ethnic diversity?

SM: Oh, there was no diversity.

BY: No, so it was predominately white?

SM: Oh, exclusively. I mean, Highline High School at that time, there were five students of color in the whole school, including the foreign exchange student. [Laughs] But it was not just culture shock, it was also an academic shock because in Portland, we were way behind in English and in math compared to where they were in the Highline District. So we had to play catch up. So we came from being in the "smart class" to struggling to keep up. Because we didn't know, like for me, it was, I didn't know how to conjugate sentences, because we hadn't learned that yet.

BY: So who were your friends when you moved to Seattle? Were they mostly white kids then?

SM: Well, yeah, I mean, that's who was there, that's who was there. And we had, on Sundays, we came into town to go to Blaine United Methodist Church, which is predominately Japanese American. And so we had friends from there, but then they were totally separate from our friends in high school. Our friends in high school were all white.

BY: And did you have any Asian American role models as a child?

SM: Oh, yeah. I mean, there were a lot of people that we admired. Family members included my cousin who was like three years older who was student body president, homecoming queen and everything of her school in Oregon. Min Yasui, who was a lawyer who was working in civil rights, my aunt Frances who worked most of her career for the World Council of Churches and traveled all over the world. And then there were people in the community that we admired from time to time. And as I became more political, politically engaged, people like Congresswoman Patsy Mink and people like that were role models.

BY: And when you were in high school, what kinds of extracurricular activities were you involved in?

SM: Well, I'm smiling because I kind of always majored in activities and minored in academics. [Laughs] I was very active in high school. I was Girls Club president and that was the only office I think I ran for, but I was real active in the clubs. And I'm terrible at other languages, but I love the idea of learning these other cultures. So I was in the Italian club, the German club, the French club, the Spanish club. Because we got to go, one of the things that happened in those after school clubs is we got to go to a restaurant and order food and all of that. So I was involved in lots of stuff.