On the morning of May 24, more than 450 schoolchildren came with their teachers to the Coolidge Auditorium for a history lesson on the civil rights movement and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The children, students from the Capitol Hill Day School, the Home Study Program at Bolling Air Force Base, Lowell School and District of Columbia public schools, were attending the third program in the "Building a Nation of Readers" series that highlights the resources of the Library of Congress and promotes lifelong learning. This series for children is cosponsored by the Public Service Collections Directorate and the Center for the Book.
Students and teachers sing "We Shall Overcome" after hearing historian Bernice Johnson Reagon provide an account in word and song of the 1960s civil rights movement. - Marita Clance
During the question-and-answer period before the program, John Cole, director of the Center for the Book, Diane Kresh, director of Public Service Collections, and Marvin Kranz, American history specialist in the Manuscript Division, were peppered with questions that ranged from "Where are you going to put all the new stuff being written?" to "What kind of jobs do you have here?" and "Where are the videos?"
Ms. Kresh then introduced the program presenters: Adrienne Cannon, African American history and culture specialist in the Manuscript Division; Mr. Kranz; Norman Middleton, the Music Division's coproducer of the Concerts from the Library of Congress series; Bernice Johnson Reagon, Distinguished Professor of History at American University, curator emerita at the Smithsonian Institution and composer and singer with the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, which she founded in 1973; and Warren Tsuneishi, former chief of the Asian Division and director of Area Studies Collections, who retired from the Library in 1993. Ms. Kresh announced that the program would consist mainly of eyewitness accounts (often accompanied by slides of historic photographs selected by Beverly Brannan, curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division). She told the students, "Some of what you hear today may be surprising and unsettling; but that, too, is what history is all about. We have to learn about the past in order to understand the present, and shape the future."
Mr. Kranz, the first presenter, told the students of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and recalled the fear and profound resentment against the Japanese that spread through the nation, especially in California. As a result, the War Relocation Authority was established by executive order on March 18, 1942, and more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were interned in 10 detention centers in isolated areas in California, Arizona, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Arkansas. "The best known and first to be established was the Manzanar Relocation Center, and Mr. Tsuneishi and his family were sent to Manzanar," said Mr. Kranz.
Mr. Tsuneishi related how he was forced to leave the University of California to report to the barbed-wire camp. He said, "What hurt most was the loss of liberty. That was very painful, and I feel it to this day." Midway through World War II, and after being screened for loyalty, Mr. Tsuneishi was allowed to enlist in the U.S. Army. Students were shown a poignant photograph of his mother in Manzanar proudly holding a blue star that meant that her child was serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.
Bernice Johnson Reagon - Marita Clance
Mr. Tsuneishi then recounted how Japanese Americans, inspired by the civil rights struggles of African Americans, organized to demand redress for the losses and injury suffered during their internment. Handout packets for the students included a copy of a letter from the Library's collections sent to approximately 60,000 Japanese Americans who had been interned, dated October 1990, and signed by then President George Bush, that states: "In enacting a law calling for restitution and offering a sincere apology, your fellow Americans have, in a very real sense, renewed their traditional commitment to the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice."
Ms. Cannon introduced two selections, read by Mr. Middleton, that centered on the "Little Rock Nine," whose integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., required President Eisenhower to send in federal troops. The first selection was a 1957 letter from Daisy Bates, head of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a key figure in the integration of Central High, to Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, about the treatment of the nine black students.
Mr. Middleton then read from a 1959 NAACP document titled "The Ordeal of Minnie Jean Brown: One of the First Nine Negro Students to Attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas." Brown was expelled from Central High for retaliating against continued mistreatment from her classmates. At the conclusion of this reading, Mr. Middleton shared his personal experiences as one of nine black students who integrated the all-white Walker Junior High School in Bradenton, Fla., in 1965.
He then provided the students with historical information on freedom songs and introduced Bernice Johnson Reagon. Ms. Reagon, a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Singer (1961-1964), and producer of the Smithsonian's three-record collection Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-66, provided a soul-stirring account, in word and song, of "the movement" during the early 1960s—a time when young black and white Americans spearheaded freedom rides, sit-ins, marches and other demonstrations against racial segregation and the "second-class citizenship" of African Americans.
