Densho Digital Repository
Emi Kuboyama, Office of Redress Administration (ORA) Oral History Project Collection
Title: Alice Kale Interview
Narrator: Alice Kale
Interviewer: Emi Kuboyama
Location: Alexandria, Virginia
Date: September 12, 2019
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1020-8-1

<Begin Segment 1>

EK: Emi Kuboyama with Stanford University. It's September 12, 2019, and we're here in Alexandria, Virginia. Good afternoon, Alice.

AK: Good afternoon, how are you?

EK: I'm fine. Why don't we get started with you introducing your full name and your Office of Redress Administration role or title?

AK: My name is Alice Kale. And I have to say, before I say anything, I'll be answering from memory, and some of those memories are a little dusty. And one thing I was sitting here thinking about is I had a title and I don't remember what it was. But I was with ORA from the very beginning, before we were even ORA, when we were just some people in the administrative office, the Executive Office in the Civil Rights Division. And Bob Bratt, our Executive Director, had gotten very, very interested in Personal Justice Denied and the legislation, and he really, really, really wanted to run this program, which could have really landed in any available spot in the Civil Rights Division. Civil Rights was a very natural home, but the administrative office, not necessarily so. And he went out and got it for us.

EK: Could you talk a little bit more about your professional experience before you started working with the office?

AK: Yeah, I had been with the government for I don't know how many years, and I worked at several agencies. I worked at Treasury, at GSA, Defense, and I had decided I wanted to work part-time. And so I was working with the Civil Rights Division doing things like administrative studies, I was management analyst. Writing publications, writing this, that and the other. And I was working very closely with Bob Bratt and Shirley Lloyd. And when this came along, I was somebody he might naturally ask to go fetch something. Go fetch something, and the first thing he asked me to fetch, the camp rosters. He knew they were at the Archives, but he didn't know really where. The Archives is an enormous place. And so the afternoon he asked me, I made a few phone calls, found the rosters were right next door, and he and I went over and looked at them for the very first time. And from that point on, I was with ORA. And we were, of course, first the Office of Reparations Administration, very temporarily, and we found that name was offensive. So within the first, I don't know, two or three weeks, we quickly made a change, ditched some stationery, and off we went.

EK: So how did you find that it was offensive?

AK: Members of the Japanese American community came forward very quickly.

EK: What do you recall about the passage of the legislation or the time leading up to that period?

AK: I had paid no attention whatsoever, until I saw Bob reading Personal Justice Denied. I was completely unaware of the legislation, I knew about the internment mostly from being a graduate student in a con. law class reading the Korematsu case.

EK: So can you talk a little bit more about your educational experience?

AK: I have a bachelor's from George Washington and a Master's from UVA. And it was during that Master's in Public Administration, during that program, that I took the con. law class. And I also remember, as a child, my father talking a little bit about what a shameful thing it was for the United States to have done that. But those were the only two things, and within days, it was all-consuming.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.