Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Grayce Uyehara Interview
Narrator: Grayce Uyehara
Interviewer: Larry Hashima
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Date: September 13, 1997
Densho ID: denshovh-ugrayce-01-0009

<Begin Segment 9>

LH: Well, I want to go back to what you were saying earlier because it was actually something that you touched on, but you really didn't develop, that I'd really like you to go more toward. You mentioned the fact that when the time came to go to Washington, and actually sort of pick up the lobbying effort full-time and doing the fundraising full-time, that someone had to go without salary. Now, I'm not sure what you meant by that, so could you expand on that?

GU: Oh, without salary? Well, if the goal was to raise $250,000, that was the budget for the year, which would include salary, and you raised $40,000. And the idea is to develop a big network of redress coordinators, like captains and then all these people to work under them, and if you're going to get it started then you'd better be prepared to give them things that they can work with. Because once you ask for commitment, and you don't provide them the tools and the materials to go out and do the lobbying then the thing can fall flat on its face. And I know that at that particular time in 1985, people had just really gotten back on their feet. They had lived many years without things, and then when you begin to let them feel like other Americans, you know, you have brand new cars and begun to buy homes and now maybe you want a bigger house and you're trying to send your kids to the right schools and things like that. Well, you're not feeling too rich yet and so... 'cause success in America unfortunately is based on how much you earn. $40,000, when there was a lot of publicity that the time has come, we must really act together to get redress. Nobody was that excited, so only $40,000 came in. So when the leaders -- and this included a group in Washington, and Mike Masaoka and Min Yasui and I understand Grant Ujifusa was in that group. Because by then he had written his political book. And these guys, again, whether this is a Nisei mentality, my name came up.

This is what Mike Masaoka wrote just before he died. You know, he says, "One day I'm going to tell you a story about how it was that you came to Washington." And so the guy said, "Well, Grayce resigned from a job because she is a East Coast coordinator" -- which is strictly a volunteer job. And the reason why I wanted to coordinate the whole East Coast and not just Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts. There are just as many other states up and down the coast, and I understood politics enough to know that this redress battle was going to be won by the efforts we accomplished in the Midwest and the East, because I knew the makeup of the judiciary committee. If you can't convince a judiciary committee of the House first, then we'd be at it forever. That much I knew. So they said to me -- Min actually, Min Yasui approached me and said, "You know, we decided that we needed somebody to do this full-time. Will you come on as a volunteer? We'll pay you your, we'll pay you to travel to Washington," 'cause I lived in Westtown, Pennsylvania at that time, and so that meant staying at a hotel Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night, come back Thursday. And they bought me copier, I already had a good typewriter. And then we converted our family room into an office, a redress office. So Friday, Saturday, Sunday I worked out of that office, so it became a seven-day job. So that's the start of the JACL redress campaign, in October of 1995.

LH: '85.

GU: And they asked me to -- oh yeah, 1985. And they asked me to do this for five, six months. That, they were sure once I really got it started, that money would come in, and I knew that if money was to come in people had the sense that there was a momentum with redress and so I really knocked myself out and it was seven days a week. I would go in on Monday by train from Wilmington, Delaware, and then generally worked until eight o'clock at night, until some of my friends in Washington got concerned that I was in this big building. They weren't sure about security, so they felt that once the building looked empty I should also leave. So that was the way it initially started and the JACL office had one typewriter. And then you had to begin to send out directions and information to all of the chapters and to the redress coordinators, and so when you had to begin to send out like three hundred copies of things to people, and you put it through the copier, and a couple of weeks of paper came out burnt, all brown. So the machine was on its last gasp and we had to buy a new machine. We had no credit in Washington, my staff of two other people, they didn't have funds. So that meant that I had to bring the family checkbook to pay the bills to run the office also. Though I was reimbursed for those expenses, such as running the office, but some things you just have to have done, because they told us, "Oh, no, you can't just, you know, pay it at the end of the month," it's cash, 'cause they said we had no credit. We hadn't established credit. So that was the way the whole program started. It was a nationwide program, it wasn't just a community thing, so eventually we were, we got a big enough copier where you're just making mailouts of a couple of thousands and that included postage, too.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.