グレッグ・ロビンソン

ロサンゼルス出身の黒人弁護士であるヒュー・マクベス・シニア氏は、今日ではその存在はほとんど忘れられていますが、第二次世界大戦中の日系アメリカ人を擁護するという称賛されるべき功績を残しています。1884年サウスカロライナ州チャールストンに生まれたヒュー・エルウッド・マクベスは、フィスク大学を卒業後、ハーバード法科大学院に進学し、1908年に卒業しました。『ボルチモアタイムス』新聞の編集者としてボルチモアで数年を過ごし、1913年カリフォルニアへ移住しました。

数十年後、マクベス弁護士は、ロサンゼルスの法曹界や政界で重要な役割を担うようになります。アフリカ系アメリカ人の原告や刑事被告人の支援に力を注ぎ、ジャズ界の偉人、ジェリー・ロール・モートンなど、著名人の弁護にもあたりました。また、人種分離法や住居供給上の人種差別に挑むため ...

Throughout the 20th century, Nikkei writers have dreamed of writing “the Great Nisei novel,” a work of literature that would express the Japanese/American experience and show off the writing talents of the second generation. Critics have meanwhile drawn attention to existing works as the “greatest”. Frank Abe, my friend and collaborator on the new anthology John Okada, claims the prize for Okada’s novel, No-No Boy (1957). I have several favorite candidates, including Gene Oishi’s remarkable work, Fox Drum Bebop (2014). Others have lauded Japanese Canadian author Joy Kogawa’s haunting novel, Obasan (1976).

These debates tend to ...

One pillar of American education is the network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). Founded to give free blacks access to higher education in the century following Emancipation, a period when African American students remained largely excluded from mainstream universities, these institutions sprang up all through the South and borderlands. Today, fifty years after the Civil Rights Movement, there are some one hundred HBCUs, both public and private, still in operation in the United States.

Even though their primary mission was to educate African Americans, these universities did not close their doors to non-blacks, either as students or professors ...

Although Shinkichi Tajiri was born and spent his early years in the United States, and served in the US army during World War II as part of the renowned “Go for Broke” 442nd Regimental Combat Team, he is best known for his work as an artist in Europe. In fall 1948 Shinkichi Tajiri sailed to France. He remained in Europe in “self-imposed exile,” as he later termed it, for the rest of his life. At first, he lived in Paris. However, at the end of the 1950s, with his wife Ferdi, a Dutch woman, he moved to the Netherlands. Some ...

One of the larger causes of Executive Order 9066, and the U.S. government’s wartime confinement of Japanese Americans, can be found in the widespread expressions of race-based fear and suspicion against West Coast Issei and Nisei in the years before Pearl Harbor. During these years hate merchants, both on the West Coast and beyond, repeatedly accused Japanese Americans of being spies and saboteurs for Tokyo—launching their charges on the flimsiest of evidence or no evidence at all.

As I reported in my book A Tragedy of Democracy (2009), during this period the well-known evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson ...