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Showing posts from February, 2011

Roger Shimomura's “Shadows of Minidoka”

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It’s easy to forget a barbed wire barrier when you weren’t behind it. Roger Shimomura, his family and more than 120,000 other Japanese were. Shimomura never forgot. “Government,” he said, “has a very, very short memory.” Shimomura unveiled “Shadows of Minidoka” Friday night at the Lawrence Arts Center to a bustling crowd of wine sippers, art aficionados and passersby. The two-room gallery, which will be open to the public until March 12, features Shimomura’s acrylic paintings and collected artifacts. The works reflect on and resurface the two years he spent at an internment camp for Japanese Americans in Minidoka, Idaho during the second World War. “We’re looking at something more than paying lip-service to diversity and history,” said Carol Ann Carter, professor of painting and former colleague of Shimomura. The paintings rely on recurring symbols to imprint their meaning and ensure that the viewer refamiliarizes oneself with this American tragedy. “Shadow of the Enemy” depicts the s

How were Japanese Americans compensated for internment?

Right after the war, no one was compensated. Those who had once owned land, (and it was only the children of the Japanese immigrants who could own property since their  parents  were denied access to American citizenship,) if families didn't sell their properties before the evacuation or during the war to  pay taxes  and storage fees, and if families were lucky enough to have good friends to watch over their property, squatters claimed right to their land and the law did little to protect the Japanese-Americans from these illegal gains.  In 1953, those whose American citizenship had been revoked were reestablished. Also that year, all Asian immigrants were finally allowed American citizenship despite the many decades they had already been living in the U.S. In 1988, President Regan gave a public apology, but it wasn't until 1992 when President George Bush Sr. issued $20,000 checks to the survivors. Compensation came fifty years later, after everyone had reestablished their li

Caleb Foote, Law Professor and Pacifist Organizer

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Caleb Foote, whose moral sense influenced him to go to prison for refusing to do even noncombatant work in World War II, then led him to become a law professor known for advocacy of criminal rights. Mr. Foote was born in Cambridge, Mass., on March 26, 1917. He graduated in 1939 from Harvard , where he was managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, and earned a master's degree in economics in 1941. The Quaker faith of his mother drew him to pacifism, and he was hired that year by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization, to open its Northern California office. His draft board had denied his request for conscientious objector status in 1940, deciding that his religious argument for the status was based more on humanist principles than on theology. Mr. Foote then refused an order to report to a camp to perform alternative service, and as a result in 1943 he was convicted for violations of the Selective Service Act. "Only by my refusal to obey this order can I u