There are times when I feel that my public school education failed me, like reading the NPR obituary for Gordon Hirabayashi. I'd never heard of him, let alone learned of his place in the history of American Civil Rights. In fact, writes Mark Memmot, Hirabayashi was one of "just a handful of Japanese-Americans who defied the government's move to put more than 100,000 of them in detention camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor. For his refusal, he was imprisoned more than a year." The obituary describes Mr. Hirabayashi as honorable and interestingly patriotic.
""This order for the mass evacuation of all persons of Japanese descent denies them the right to live," Seattle native Gordon Hirabayashi wrote in 1942. "I consider it my duty to maintain the democratic standards for which this nation lives. Therefore, I must refuse this order of evacuation.""
Perhaps with the exception of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the civil rights failures towards African-Americans, I think my elementary and high school education largely glossed over other kinds of civil rights failures and victories which have marked U.S. history. I felt similarly when reading the history of class struggles outline by Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." (If you feel that your understanding of Americna History lacks voices outside the white, protestant, male narrative, it probably is, and I highly recommend Zinn's work.) Stories like Mr. Hirabayashi's we not included in my grade-school discourse on American History. Next Monday marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day; I can't help but to see the parallels between these who men who defended so honorably the freedom they believed in -- and I think there is a place in American History for both of these stories (and others).
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