Necessity has taken William Hohri in some surprising directions. Over the past 18 years, the 61-year-old Albany Park man, a computer programmer by trade, has learned how to lobby congressmen, how to bring a class-action suit against the U.S. government, how to raise funds, how to get the attention of the press, and most recently, how to author a book.
“The redress movement began with a conservative effort,” said Peter Irons, a lawyer and political science professor at the. University of California in San Diego who won several key redress battles in court. “I think [Hohri] really prodded the leadership to act more strongly and more quickly than it might have.”
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But Hohri does more than tell the story of the redress movement. Although Repairing America is not intended as autobiography, it contains a compelling account of how racial victimization led Hohri to his role as an outspoken proponent of civil rights–for all minorities.
Ten weeks later, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order granting the authority to “exclude” all Japanese-Americans from the west coast. More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forced to leave their homes, sell their property and businesses, often at a considerable loss, and move to a detention camp (there were ten scattered across the country). They never received hearings or learned the charges against them.
Hohri, on the other hand, developed a belief in social activism and a remarkable idealism about American democracy while he was in the camp. In fact, in an interview he wryly recalls the experience as “a tremendous civics lesson.” His description isn’t entirely facetious: one of his teachers in camp, he says, a socialist pacifist, made a strong impression on him when she played protest songs by black leftist performer Paul Robeson. “She was wondering aloud what kind of protest songs we were going to write about the camps,” Hohri remarks. “We felt that what happened to us was wrong. But she began to make us aware of the political reality.”
As Hohri writes, “In the earlier period [World War II], most Japanese-Americans were unaware of decisions being made on their behalf [by the JACL]. We hardly knew about the constitutional test cases, the substantial draft resistance, and the implications of JACL’s opposition to these actions. But in 1979, we were better informed. . . . We were not about to repeat the mistakes of World War II.”
