![]() ![]() ![]() But you can say that of any generation, I think. “I would say on a proportional level, we probably have not carried on as much as we could,” Minami said frankly. I posed the question to Dale Minami, a key attorney in the legal team that overturned Korematsu’s conviction forty years after the Supreme Court decision. Or has our relative prosperity made us too comfortably complacent? Have those of us in subsequent generations done enough and met the challenge of our rich history of activists and troublemakers? In light of Asian Americans, the “model minority,” with the highest incomes per racial group, known for our docility and quiet demeanor, have we lived up to our heroes’ examples? It all took a lot of courage and guts.Īnd so while the scions took the stage to stand in for their heroic forebears, it all made me wonder if those of us in later generations have done our share. Nothing these honorees did or were forced to endure was easy. And if your interrogator was really mean, you get a slap in the face.” “Every time they don’t believe you, they pull it a little higher. She described being tied up from the back and suspended in the air while being questioned. “No one is treated well when you are taken,” Poblete told me. She was captured and held in a concentration camp for six months. Included in the “veterano” group was one Lourdes Poblete, 88, who was a Filipino guerrilla fighter at age 18. Army, but still continue a fight for pay equity to this day. ![]() Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team and their legendary “Go for Broke” battle cry.Īnd there were the Filipino “Veteranos” of WWII, many of them Filipino Scouts, who fought side by side with the U.S. There were the Japanese Americans of the U.S. It included Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, who organized farm laborers in California but have been unfairly put in the shadow of Cesar Chavez. The list of honorees at this year’s event included Wong Kim Ark, the Chinese American whose case is the basis for birthright citizenship in the U.S. 30th, Fred Korematsu’s birthday, is already recognized in California, Utah, and this year in Hawaii. But she says her life mission at the moment is to make Korematsu Day a national holiday. Karen liked my idea of an ongoing “Hall of Fame,” or a shrine memorializing the honorees. Korematsu Day in California, it not only lets us tell his story for his struggle for justice and the Japanese American internment, but also to educate people about everyone else’s struggle for justice and their stories of standing up for what is right,” said Korematsu’s daughter, Karen. Indeed, telling the stories of other Asian Americans who stood up for justice was the big deal at this year’s Fred T. “She finally realizes it’s a big deal for us in our generation.” “I don’t think she realized what she did as an activist,” Karen Fong said. Sitting next to her was daughter-in-law Karen Fong. “We organized the union and went on strike and we all got hired in the white shops.” “Other white shops didn’t hire Asians,” Fong told me. Not only were conditions improved in the factories, but a racial barrier was broken in the city’s retail stores. The strike ended when white retail clerks at National Dollar refused to cross the Chinese workers’ picket line. If you don’t know Fong, I don’t blame you.įong was one of the members of the 1938 National Dollar Store strike in San Francisco, a strike against sweatshop conditions and low wages for garment workers in the city’s Chinatown. government’s internment of Japanese Americans all the way to the Supreme Court. If you’re Asian American, you likely know Korematsu - the man who fought the U.S. ![]() Korematsu Day celebration in San Francisco on Sunday, most of the honorees had passed on and were represented by their scions.īut I managed to sit next to one of the originals, 98-year-old Mabel Fong. ![]()
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