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RB: Yeah, so it definitely sounds like Seabrook was a company town. Would you also describe it as a Japantown?

MN: Not entirely. In the late '40s, and I think a little bit to the into the early 50s, refugees from mostly the Baltic states moved into Seabrook. These were, I think, numerically mostly Estonians, but there were others, there were Latvians and Lithuanians, ethnic Germans. There were people who had been in refugee camps after the end of World War II, and some who were in refugee camps for quite a while. They came to Seabrook, they were an interesting community in many ways. In what I've interpreted later, in class terms, you know, we some of the Estonians who did settle, you know, were quite people of some prominence Estonia. I mean, we knew that, I had a couple of friends whose fathers were regional governors, a regional governor, and a mayor of a town in Estonia. And it added a kind of, you know, another element of, I don't know, ethnicity to the community. And there were friendships also that developed that context. Within this broader, kind of multicultural setting, I think the community itself, the Estonians became a quite visible part of this community and the community more broadly, you know, in schools, et cetera. So I think our historians were also smart, at least that's the way I interpreted it. So, you know, it's sort of, they were a positive force in that sense. I would also, in retrospect, you know, they were racist, as were, I think, some of us in terms of the way in which we saw the world, which was still, in spite of ourselves, I think some of us saw it still in black and white terms.

And maybe I should deal with it a little bit here. Seabrook housing was segregated. I mean, in other words, you had a number of types of housing where you had, initially when Japanese Americans, there were these barrack type housing, they're somewhat similar, actually, to the internment camps, probably from the same architect. Courtesy of the U.S. Army probably. But that and then we're called, I think it was Hoover Village and Hoover Annex, and I used to think for years that they were named after Herbert Hoover, but apparently they were named after the housing director at Seabrook. [Laughs] And they were later knocked out, but there were other types of housing. There were cinderblock apartments, there were what were called dormitories, which I think were basically oriented initially towards single men. Then you had two types of housing which existed across Highway 77 in Seabrook, what we used to call bungalows, which are these older single-story houses, and then a newer set, what we call prefabs, which is what they were, that were built later on in the in the early '50s. And there was housing that Black people lived in, remote from those sections I've just described. And there was a stretch of housing on what's called Oak Road, there was also housing near the plant itself, called Foster Village. And it was clearly I mean, when I got back from the South, as you can imagine, my antenna or would be up, looking at what was the reality here. So my sister and I, I think, went to the housing office and said basically, I mean, "What the hell is going on? Why don't Black people live with us?" And there was a  song and dance about it. Nothing very persuasive and nothing that changed either, that I knew of at that time. I mean, this was mid-'60s, I went back to school, as did my sister. And there was, nobody was storming the streets to protest housing displacement or discrimination. And that was that, but we were also, I mean, let's be honest, a number of people who worked at Seabrook Farms were Japanese, they were complicit in the policy, and that's the way it was. So that's a dimension of life and Seabrook that I think, until recently, has not really been focused on much. And understandably, it's not exactly a proud moment in the life of the village. And I think, you know, it's like everything else. It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that, it's mixed. And we tend to favor, you know, that which is the most flattering. And I think that this is one of the realities that needs to be put forward in terms of our story, our collective story.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.