School Named for Japanese American Civil Rights Icon
Nichi Bei Times, News Report, Kenji G. Taguma, Posted: Sep 25, 2005
On June 21, 1943, not immune to the feverish anti-Japanese sentiment of the time, the Davis City Council passed a resolution supporting the mass forced removal of those of Japanese descent on the West Coast. To add insult to injury, the same resolution, which passed on a unanimous 4-0 vote, urged a constitutional amendment preventing their return after a cessation of hostilities.
Time has healed some wounds, it seems, as the Davis Joint Unified Board of Education voted on Sept. 15, 2005 to name its newest elementary school after a Japanese American civil rights icon who stood against those very relocation orders.
In a dramatic deliberation Thursday evening at Davis’ City Hall, the Board of Education voted 3-2 to name the school after Fred T. Korematsu, who defied the relocation orders in 1942 and passed away in March at the age of 86.
The Fred T. Korematsu Elementary School at Mace Ranch will be located at 5th Street and Alhambra in East Davis.
“This is a wonderful victory!” exclaimed an exuberant Madhavi Sunder, a University of California-Davis law professor who served on the Naming Committee that was empowered to come up with recommendations of five names. “The Davis School Board made the pioneering step to name the first school in the country after civil rights legend and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Fred T. Korematsu.”
Sunder proposed Korematsu’s name, and later served as chief advocate in rallying community support for it.
“I think this is a tremendous step for Japanese Americans and all Americans to recognize Fred Korematsu with this honor,” said Andy Noguchi, civil rights co-chair of the Florin chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, who attended several meetings during the naming process.
“The potential now exists to share with Davis students and community members the critical lesson of each of us standing up, like Fred Korematsu, when we see other Americans unfairly targeted in time of crisis due to their ethnicity.
“I believe that is part of the reason there was such strong support from Muslim Americans by the Council for American Islamic Relations and the Arab American community by the National Council of Arab Americans,” Noguchi added. “They feel the same threat today.”
Dubbed the “Asian American Rosa Parks” -- an ordinary person who in standing up for their rights was elevated to extraordinary heights -- Korematsu’s case would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Although he lost his bid for justice in the 1940s, his case was revisited some 40 years later by a team of young third-generation Japanese American attorneys. Seizing upon new evidence that the government suppressed key documents, Korematsu -- and essentially the entire Japanese American community -- was vindicated, and the victory helped to put a spark in the Japanese American Redress Movement.
Big Decision
The issue was heard by the Board of Education on Sept. 1, and while they heard testimony from the public then, they tabled the actual vote until Thursday.
At Thursday night’s meeting, more than two dozen speakers spoke in favor of mainly three candidates: Korematsu, Mace Ranch and John Barovetto, a local Vietnam War hero who died in the process of getting relief supplies to children in Vietnam during that war.
After the public testimony, it was up to the board to make the final decision.
Board of Education Vice President Keltie Jones, the sole board member to speak in support of a candidate at the last meeting, reiterated her support for Korematsu, citing the “incredible learning opportunities” and “personal connections” with local Japanese American internees.
She said one of the main lessons to be taught was “don’t be a bystander -- when you see something wrong, don’t just stand there.”
Board member Jim Provenza mentioned the importance of having role models, and cited an e-mail received from an Asian American Davis high school student who felt that she didn’t fit in because she had no role models.
Others stressed the invisibility felt by some in the Asian American community, which constitutes some 17 percent of Davis.
Board member Joan Sallee, however, said local trumped national, and lent her strong support to Barovetto. She said she took the day off to read every e-mail sent into the Board of Education.
“We never named a school for our students, and that is who John Barovetto is,” said Sallee, noting he was a student body president at the local high school. “He’s someone I wish I would have known.”
With the tally apparently deadlocked, board member Marty West, a law professor at UC Davis, revealed a personal story that served as an emotional turning point.
West revealed that her pacifist parents, Mary and Ralph Smeltzer, left their jobs as high school teachers in Los Angeles to volunteer as teachers in the Manzanar concentration camp during World War II.
The camps were so horrible, West said, that after a year teaching there, they helped to resettle more than 1,000 Japanese Americans to a Chicago hostel. In 1944 they moved to do the same in Brooklyn, requiring security to deal with the harassment by those who ostracized them for harboring Japanese Americans.
The Smeltzers were among the concentration camp teachers recently honored by the Japanese American National Museum. Although her father has passed, West’s mother is still alive, and will turn 90 next month.
One inmate at Manzanar gave West’s parents a watercolor produced behind the barbed wire, a piece which she hopes would someday hang in the Korematsu school.
“Having a name like Korematsu brings us together to our immigrant roots,” West said.
Citing local concerns, Board President B.J. Kline said his first choice was “Mace Ranch,” followed by Barovetto.
With the board seemingly split, Provenza proposed a compromise: naming the school the Fred T. Korematsu Elementary School at Mace Ranch.
“Naming a school should be a unifying event, not a divisive one,” rationalized Provenza. “To me, it’s the best I could do to unify a community.”
Provenza added that the district would stipulate that the shortened name would be “Korematsu School.”
After some more deliberation, the new name was passed on a 3-2 vote, with Kline and Sallee voting against it.
The room erupted in applause as the school board helped to correct, in a sense, a failure of its own city council some 62 years ago.
Atoning for Past Mistake
For some, the discovery of the 1943 Davis City Council resolution and the subsequent naming of the school after Korematsu Thursday brought the Japanese American experience full circle.
Some saw the latest move as an attempt to, in part, make up for the city’s past skeletons of racial intolerance.
“We often tend to think that these national, tragic events like the Japanese internment happened somewhere else to people we did not know; that the internment was perpetrated by people who were wholly different from us,” said Sunder. “The resolution brought the internment home -- here was one of the most famous mayors in Davis history, Mayor Covell, for whose family a major thoroughfare in this town is named, who pushed through a resolution to the City Council that not only ‘commended’ the internment but refused the repatriation of internees to Davis -- even after the cessation of hostilities.’
“This was our own city closing its doors to Japanese American internees even after the war’s end,” added Sunder. “The City Council’s resolution emphasized the need for our community to reckon with our own past.”
Sunder, however, does not think that City Council resolution is necessarily a permanent stain on the city’s record.
“The tremendous community support we have gotten for the naming of the Korematsu school is uplifting and sends a strong, positive signal of who we are as a community today,” she said. “We delivered to the Board of Education the names of nearly 300 Davis residents who supported naming the school after Korematsu.”
Sunder said the Korematsu naming was supported for all different reasons: for the educational lessons it offered, to represent the diversity of Davis and present an inspiring role model to Asian American and all children there, and to honor Korematsu’s courage.
“A broad spectrum of Davis residents came out to support these values, and that is what counts today,” Sunder said. “And of course, this name will now literally be written into stone on the wall outside of our new elementary school. In this way, the name will inspire us to create a better Davis community tomorrow through our children who will attend the school and learn these lessons.”
Former Davis City Councilman Jerry Kaneko said similar resolutions were passed in nearby Yolo County towns of Woodland and Winters as well.
As news of the 1943 resolution spread, people have begun talking about moving to rescind the resolution. In recent years, other municipalities in California have successfully revoked such resolutions.
Board member Keltie Jones called it an “excellent opportunity” to make such a move.
Former Davis Senior High School Student Body President Norbie Kumagai has made such a suggestion in an e-mail to advocates of the Korematsu naming.
“I think this an excellent idea,” said Noguchi. “Only when a community recognizes and repudiates its racist past can it sincerely start to move forward.”
Educational Process
Whatever the outcome, those involved agreed it was an educational process for the board and the community itself, as they were able to examine the contributions of local heroes and address an often overlooked and neglected segment of the community.
Jones said the board also received some “very disrespectful” letters from the public, such as calling Korematsu a “whiner” and saying that someone who broke the law shouldn’t be honored.
Jones revealed, however, that the e-mails received were “overwhelmingly” in support of Korematsu.
“I, too, did not know about Fred Korematsu,” said Sallee, who said the process “taught me a lot.”
Former City Councilman Jerry Kaneko, a longtime Davis resident, said the vote was not a surprise. He spoke in favor of Korematsu’s name, but said it wouldn’t have bothered him if Barovetto was chosen. “He’s really the only home grown hero we have, in a sense,” said Kaneko.
For West, naming the school after Korematsu was an opportunity to revisit her own family’s legacy. “It was a way to honor my parents and the Japanese American community,” she said.
“This was truly a community effort,” said Sunder. “I was privileged to meet so many inspiring, informed, and remarkable people through this process. I was proud to watch children and grandchildren of Internees come forward to do what they can now to bring recognition to their families’ struggles, and to create a better community in the future.
“They emphasized that we should not forget the lessons of our history or else we will be doomed to repeat it,” she added. “They emphasized the need to recognize similar violations of the civil liberties of Muslim and Sikh Americans in our post-9/11 community.
“I think Mr. Korematsu would have been proud of all of us.”
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