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EO: Tell us about the Fair Play Committee.

MK: Well, this Fair Play Committee started in Heart Mountain. It was a organized group. It originally started from a, a few people, I think. One of them was a Hawaiian, I think this man was a college graduate in Hawaii, and very educated and very understanding of the Constitution of the United States. And he went around camp talking about the Constitution. And he called himself the Fair Play Committee of One. Then the people listened to him and says, "Hey, this man really knows what he's talkin' about." You know, before that, before he went around talking like that, everybody said well, we have to cooperate, we have to accommodate the government, we have to have a positive image so we'll be accepted, things like that. In other words, we have to kowtow to the racial demands, racist demands of the government before we'll be accepted as citizens. But this man says, "No, we, we are Americans. The Constitution is supposed to defend us and that I'm talking about the rights we have under the Constitution." And then a few people joined him, then I think more and more people listened to him and, and joined up and this made the Fair Play Committee. And there were, there were many, many people. Many of 'em were over draft age, too, so...

Many of the Fair Play Committee leaders, there was a difference between the Fair Play Committee, we were the Fair Play Committee members, Fair Play Committee leaders, were seven of them. And most were over draft age and they were married and had children. So they would have never been affected by the draft. But they thought it was very wrong for the government to draft us out of a concentration camp. So they, they were fighting for a clarification of our rights. And they could have been just like anybody else, just ignored it and just act like, like most of the Japanese Americans did at the camps, was just ignore it, and... but to them it was a, really a big issue. They were ready to stick up for us, and they suffered for it.

The seven Fair Play Committee leaders were tried for conspiracy to counsel us to not go to our physical. And they were, they took their case to court, too. And they were found guilty and they were sentenced to four, four years in federal prison. But they took the case to a higher court, I think it was the 10th Court, 10th Court of Appeals, and they won their case. But they served eighteen months in a federal prison. And I think highly of them because here they didn't have to do that, but their conscience told them to, what was right and what's wrong. And Frank Emi and another person are the only remaining living members of the Fair Play Committee leaders. And Frank was married and had two children, and he probably would never have been drafted, but still his conscience told him that it was morally and legally wrong to fight, and to fight for the rights of the draftees. So I have a lot of respect for those people.

As for us, original sixty-three, we went to court, and we found the court very prejudiced. We had a lawyer named Samuel Menin from Denver, a ACLU lawyer. He tried his best, but you got to remember what, how the situation was and how the climate was at the time in Wyoming. And I believe to this day that we never had a fair trial. The judge would only listen to the reason that, from the federal prosecutor, that we just didn't go to our physical. They never took into account that our rights were taken away from us by being incarcerated in the concentration camp, and that the only thing that we were asking was the return of our rights before we went into the army.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.