Densho Digital Archive
Frank Abe Collection
Title: Michi Weglyn Interview
Narrator: Michi Weglyn
Interviewers: Frank Abe (primary); Frank Chin (secondary)
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: February 20, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-wmichi-01-0014

<Begin Segment 14>

FA: Michi, what have you found -- the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, what do you, how do you regard their accomplishment, what they did?

MW: Well, first of all, you have to give this group an enormous amount of credit because you have to understand -- and it's very difficult for most people to understand -- that these young men, some of them were only seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Of course, we had people like Frank Emi who didn't have to get involved because he was married and had two children. He was one of the older ones. But when you think of how young they were and that they, they were bright. I would say that they were bright. If they had been ordinary Joe Blows, or people like me -- I went to camp at fifteen, I was so naive. It's unbelievable, it's truly unbelievable for me to believe that somebody seventeen, eighteen, let's say three years older than me, had enough courage. And he had an understanding of the Constitution to the degree that he would say, "Oh, this is utterly, utterly against everything I've been taught. The Constitution promises liberty and justice, and it does not... the Bill of Rights protects us. We in no way have been protected by it. We have been deprived of all our rights, shorn of it." And for a young person to think that deeply, and I'm shocked at this late date that there are those of us who are in our seventies, eighties who still can't understand how important it is to know what your Constitution stands for. And that in an emergency like that it is supposed to protect us. But that these old fogies say, "Oh, those whipper-snappers. They didn't really understand what they were doing. They probably just followed the crowd."

But, you know, I've gotten to know quite a number of them, and I am so impressed. I cannot throw away a letter they write me because it is a letter of such fervor. They are able to articulate in a way that the average person does not even bother to. They understand the significance of what they had done and the fact that to this day they are so proud of it and they would do it again. And they tell of their brothers who fought in the Pacific or who served in Europe and the fact that they all understood. And I think that is marvelous; that you can go against your entire family at that early age and believe even though the government, they were threatening to fine them, what was it? Ten thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars and so many years in jail. It was a horrific fine that they were threatened with. Who knows? It was a time when they could have easily been shot and nobody would have had much pity for them. But they believed that strongly in the righteousness of their cause that we have no right in a democratic America to have concentration camps for U.S. citizens who are guaranteed their inalienable rights in the Constitution. And they truly believed what they had been taught. I was taught all that myself. But I just thought of it like when I had to memorize Lincoln's Gettysburg address. It was just words to me. And the Civil War did not hit me in a way it does now that I have become a little bit more knowledgeable of what a gory, gory war it was of brother against brother.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.