<Begin Segment 17>

JA: Tell me the circumstances of your leaving camp.

SE: I decided after the December 7th riot that I did not want to spend another Christmas in Manzanar, and so I filed an application to, for what they called Application for Leave, which was the original title of the "loyalty oath," and I got an offer from the YWCA in Madison, Wisconsin, for a month of board and room and they would help me find a job. I had several friends who had gone to work at the Madison General Hospital and the Catholic Hospital, they were nurses, and they were writing to me to tell me to come out and things are very, much, much better back east. And so when the offer came from the YWCA I decided to take it and go and try to get into the University of Wisconsin because I wanted to go back to school. So that's how I got to leave camp. I took the train from Reno, Nevada, clear across to Chicago. My brother met me there, stayed overnight, and I went to Madison, Wisconsin. I found a job there, I stayed at the YWCA, and some other people started to come out of the camps, and I got to meet them. But Madison is a, is a college town. There are no big industries, so it was very difficult to find a decent job. So, after a year there working for the County of Dane offices, I decided to move to Chicago and be with my brother.

JA: How was your departure from camp processed? Did you have to sign papers or anything?

SE: What happened was after all the papers were processed, I had to have my photograph taken, my finger, fingerprints taken, at least a thumbprint. They gave me a small green card that gave me permission to leave Manzanar with a photograph on it. And they arranged for us to leave by station wagon to Reno. Because of the riot, we left by the back gate to Manzanar. What happened was they came and picked us up in a station wagon and our suitcases, and then we drove to the back of the camp, and there was a guard there and they processed our papers and let us out, and we got on the Highway 395 and drove to Reno.

JA: What did you learn by being at Manzanar?

SE: Well, I think the biggest lesson I learned was that we were a group of people who had no power because we had no representation in Congress or in any governmental agency, and that if we really wanted to get our voices heard, then we had to be an active participant in a democracy. And so after I came back to California I became active in local elections, the mayor's race, city council races, gradually extended to state and national offices. I tried to participate in local government. When I campaigned for Tom Bradley for mayor of Los Angeles, he was the first black mayor to be elected. He promised the women in the city that he would set up a commission to look into the practices of the city to keep women out of jobs that they thought that only men could do, and so he appointed me a member of the commission, it was a seven-member commission. They set up the resolution to start the commission. So I was active there for ten years, and in the meantime got involved with the Manzanar pilgrimage in 1969 when students and community activists decided to go up to Manzanar. After that I got more and more involved in preserving Manzanar as a historic site --

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.