<Begin Segment 11>

BF: So after you were the witness chair, what became your new responsibilities or your additional responsibilities for the redress?

CT: Well, then I became chair of the redress committee. Actually, I was a co-chair with a Jewish fellow, who's married to a Nisei friend of mine. But you know, after a while it -- he wasn't too keen on monetary redress, and so I ended up doing most of it alone. He'd help me by helping me carry the slide projector or something like that, but he didn't do the talking or anything like that. And I also put a slide show together with all these pictures of camp and the evacuation, you know, there were a number of photos available. So I put a slide show together, because I felt that pictures can -- it's like a thousand words. People, when people saw this they reacted, and so I always took this little slide show with me and talked to groups.

BF: So as the, as the chair in Chicago of the redress movement for JACL, was there a different strategy employed in the Midwest, as opposed to say on the West Coast, where there's a much larger group of Asians?

CT: Well, yeah, there had to be, because we had to ask other groups to help. And like being a group like the American Jewish Committee, and we had an Illinois ethnic consultation, and churches where Nisei were members, I mean, all of these groups -- we had to ask them for help. And that's the way we got support of many of the people.

BF: By building these coalitions?

CT: Yes, yes.

BF: So do you, in, kind of in retrospect, do you feel as though it, maybe in the Midwest there was a little bit more educating going on of non-Nikkei, in particular?

CT: Oh yes, absolutely. Well, you know in 1967, I did this exhibit of twenty-five years since the evacuation. I put this exhibit together, and I had some of the artifacts of things that people made in camp, and photos, Toyo Miyatake's photos that he did. You know, he took those pictures with a camera he made inside, inside camp, because cameras were contraband. But I had those photos, I had Mine Okubo's cartoons of the camps and then I thought, "Gee, it'd be interesting if we showed the papers, newspapers." So I went to the library and here's this little article -- that big -- saying "120,000 Japanese..." that's all. That's all that was in the paper.

BF: That was the sole announcement of the internment.

CT: Yeah, right, right.

BF: So, you had your work cut out for you.

CT: But it was interesting. I loved doing exhibits, I was, I did a Chicago supplement to the Strength and Diversity exhibit -- you've heard of that exhibit -- and then I also did the Chicago supplement to the More Perfect Union Smithsonian exhibit we had. That's what I love to do.

BF: So the work goes on.

CT: Oh yes. Oh yes. We're plugging away all the time.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.