Densho Digital Repository - Joanne Chiedi Interview (Densho ID: ddr-densho-1020-5-1)

<Begin Segment 1>

EK: Emi Kuboyama with Stanford University, here with Joanne Chiedi in Washington, D.C., today is May 20th. Joanne, could you start by stating your name and where you were born and raised, and then your ORA role or title?

JC: Sure. Joanne Chiedi, I was born and raised here in Washington, D.C. And the title that I ended with was Deputy Administrator for the redress program, but I started with, as the Deputy Director for the Verification Unit.

EK: So could you talk a little bit about your educational background prior to starting at the Department of Justice, and kind of your progression at the Department of Justice?

JC: Sure. So I'm a graduate from Mount St. Mary's University in sociology and criminal justice. And I started at the Justice Department as a student intern in 1982. And then when I graduated in the summer of 1983 they offered me a permanent position and I started working for the Employment Litigation Section in the Civil Rights Division. So I worked there up until 1989, and at that time, a friend of mine, a colleague at the Justice Department in the Employment Litigation Section said she was working on a detail on a program called the Office of Redress Administration. And said that, "You may want to consider applying for this job." And there was a job ad out for the Verification Unit. And my job in Employment Litigation was locating and verifying eligibility for people who were, employment discrimination cases. So we would have a consent decree, we would have the eligibility requirements, and then it was our job to find those individuals. So it was like a perfect pairing with what they needed in the redress program. So I applied for a job, I interviewed with Bob Bratt, and I was hired to start that unit. And basically, all we had were huge paper records, microfiche, and oral history from the legislation. And that's when I hired Lisa Johnson, I hired two students who sat in front of a computer and entered war records all day long, basically. So that created our database, 'cause this was all pre-internet. So there's no internet, there's only going to the National Archives, seeing what they had, bringing those paper documents back, and then entering them into a system, unless it was microfiche. So we did have microfiche readers and we were able to glean some information from there. But we were developing, basically, the criteria was set out for us, we were building a database of all the names and where an individual was either interned or where they lived at the time if they were forced to evacuate. So we were just building all that basis for the Verification Unit.