Twenty years after Japanese Americans had left the World War II concentration camps, the Black Civil Rights and Black Power Movements stirred Japanese Americans into a four-year movement to repeal the law that gave the U.S. President executive fiat to institute concentration camps at any time. This was one of the earliest issues at the beginning of the Asian American Movement that shows how Japanese Americans have an intertwined history with African Americans, and the interactions it produced.
What follows are excerpts from an article in Amerasia 2:2 (Fall 1974)…
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From the editor’s introduction:
The Emergency Detention Act, as Okamura points out, “might have become another obsolete and unenforced law, but it started to gain new meaning in early 1967.” Rumors spread rapidly through Black communities that concentration camps were being prepared for Black people in order to put an end to their “riots.” Black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Malcolm X , and eventually Martin Luther King, Jr. claimed that if Japanese Americans could be placed in concentration camps, so could Black people. Rumors also spread through the anti-war movement that mass incarcerations were being planned to thwart its protest of the Vietnam war.
It was in this setting that a four-year campaign to repeal the Emergency Detention Act was launched and spearheaded by the authors of the following articles and commentaries. Ray Okamura and Edison Uno served as national co-chairmen for the National Ad Hoc Committee for Repeal of the Emergency Detention Act. Judge Robert Takasugi was the national legal counsel for JACL, and Hiroshi Kanno served as the JACL’s Midwest District chairman for the repeal drive. These articles are the first public discussions, which have been written by the participants themselves, on the campaign that culminated with the successful repeal of Title II on September 21, 1971.
More on the campaign to repeal Title II, below the fold…
From the article “Campaign To Repeal The Emergency Detention Act,”
by Raymond Okamura, Robert Takasugi, Hiroshi Kanno and Edison Uno
Amerasia Journal Volume 2, Number 2, Fall 1974, pp. 71-94
Passage of the Law (1950)
The Internal Security Act of 1950 was passed shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War and during the Joseph McCarthy era of communist witchhunts. The law consisted of two parts: Title I, the Subversive Activities Control Act; and Title II, the Emergency Detention Act. Parts of Title I, which required the registration of Communists, were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and repealed in 1968. However, the remainder of Title I, which placed restrictions on organizations and individuals labeled “Communist” by the Subversive Activities Control Board, and all of Title II were retained.
Both Titles I and II became popularly known as the “McCarran Act,” but Title I would more accurately be called the “Mundt-Nixon Act,” because Representatives Karl Mundt and Richard Nixon were the originators, and Senator Pat McCarran was only a later co-sponsor. Similarly, Title II should have been called the Kilgore-Douglas-Humphrey, et al. Act,” because during the Senate debate on Title I, “liberal” Senators Kilgore, Douglas, Humphrey, Lehman, Graham, Kefauver, and Benton introduced Title II as a substitute bill, supposedly as a tactic to defeat Title I. McCarran, himself, opposed Title II, calling it “a concentration camp law, pure and simple.” Mundt, also, opposed Title II, calling it a program for “establishing concentration camps into which people might be put without benefit of trial, but merely by executive fiat . . . simply by an assumption, mind you, that an individual might be thinking about engaging in espionage or sabotage.” In June, 1950, the Korean War broke out, public paranoia of communism intensified, and easily-panicked liberals joined conservatives to pass both Titles I and II. President Harry Truman vetoed the legislation, calling it “a long step toward totalitarianism,” but Congress overrode the veto by a two-thirds vote, and the Internal Security Act became law on Sept. 23, 1950.
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A New Meaning (1967)
The Emergency Detention Act might have become another obsolete and unenforced law, but it started to gain new meaning in early 1967. The civil rights movement was transformed into the Black Power movement, and blazing ghetto riots shook the nation’s complacency. Simultaneously, the anti-Vietnam war movement gained momentum with massive demonstrations, and an alarming number of white youths ”dropped out” of the established system. The silent generation of the 1950s was over, and America entered a period of protest and uncertainty. The power structure responded with police violence and resistance to change. Blacks, war protestors, and counter-culture youth began to worry about severe repression, and rumors of concentration camps for unpopular Americans began circulating. “Concentration Camps USA”, a booklet by Charles Allen, Jr., was the first published account of the Title II detention camps, and it became the basis for all subsequent articles on the subject. By mid-1967, the concentration camp rumors increased, as Black militants Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown made speeches about it, and articles appeared in the underground newspapers.
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By late May, the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) was formed in Berkeley, California, and one of its first activities was to issue an information leaflet, “Concentration Camps USA,” which reviewed the dangers of Title II and discussed the controversy to date. Breaking with previous norms by practicing militancy and advocating Asian pride and unity, AAPA founded what is known today as the “Asian movement.” (AAPA was first to promote use of “Asian” rather than “oriental.”) AAPA -members forcefully spoke out against Title II at various public gatherings—from Black Panther Party rallies to meetings of the Oakland City Council. Also, as a means of reaching the more traditional-minded Asians, AAPA started a petition drive calling on Congress to repeal Title II.
The JACL Resolution
After months of futile correspondence with congressmen and refusals of the Northern California and National American Civil Liberties Unions to become involved in legal or legislative action, Okamura decided to join the JACL and follow the procedure earlier outlined by Masaoka. On June 2, 1968, Okamura, together with a veteran JACL member, Mary Anna Takagi of Oakland, California, called the first meeting to organize an ad hoc committee to get the JACL involved. The initial committee consisted of only seven members from the Berkeley, Contra Costa, and Oakland chapters of JACL.
This small East Bay group realized that Japanese Americans, as the past victims of American concentration camps, were in the best position to lead a repeal campaign. Moreover, the group felt it was imperative for Japanese Americans to assume the leadership in order to promote Third World unity. Japanese Americans had been the passive beneficiaries of the Black civil rights movement, and this campaign was the perfect issue by which Japanese Americans could make a contribution to the overall struggle for justice in the United States. The group decided to campaign visibly as Japanese Americans and to utilize the ready-made organizational structure of the JACL. JACL was the only Japanese American organization with a paid Washington lobbyist and a national legislative capability.
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Other articles on the Repeal Movement of Title II:
“Prohibiting ‘American Concentration Camps’: Repeal of the Emergency Detention Act and the Public Historical Memory of the Japanese American Internment” by Masumi Izumi, Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 74, No. 2, May, 2005, pp. 165-193.
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