"No Jap Crow": Japanese Americans encounter the World War II south.

DURING THE FINAL WINTER OF WORLD WAR II, BILL HOSOKAWA boarded a bus bound for the Arkansas Delta. Having received an early release from a Wyoming internment camp to work for the Des Moines Register, the young reporter set off to visit two similar camps operated by the War Relocation Authority just west of the Mississippi River. As the vehicle headed south from Iowa, Hosokawa witnessed the peculiar customs of Jim Crow for the first time. From his seat in the front half of the bus, the journalist jotted notes on what he saw. Hosokawa encountered segregated bathrooms, restaurants, and waiting areas as he traveled through the border states. By the time the bus reached Arkansas, it was so full that passengers were standing in the aisle. Boarding and exiting the bus became an elaborate ritual of segregation, as whites emptied the front half of the bus at every stop to allow blacks to file in and out of the back section. The whole process, Hosokawa later recalled, seemed "profoundly ridiculous." (1)

Before 1940 few Japanese Americans had ever set foot in the Deep South. Three years later, more than sixteen thousand relocated Californians and Hawaiians lived behind barbed wire in the Arkansas Delta. Meanwhile, hundreds of Japanese American recruits trained at military bases across the region. (2) Although Bill Hosokawa could see "no middle ground in the South's polarized society of black and white," Japanese Americans confounded the color line in the Jim Crow South. (3) That the unprecedented influx alarmed many citizens is not surprising considering the anti-Japanese sentiment sweeping the country in the wake of Pearl Harbor. But southern fears ran deeper, as leading whites worked to offset the impact of a third "race" on the segregated status quo. To accommodate Japanese American servicemen, local officials decided to keep them on the white side of the color line. But simply allowing Japanese Americans to use white water fountains and restrooms proved an uneasy compromise. Japanese Americans were a conspicuous other in a volatile racial caste system. Moreover, they refused to "act white." Many Japanese American troops rejected the rules of segregated society, while others actively rebelled against discrimination. As southern whites quickly realized, Japanese American internees and soldiers in Dixie posed a variety of challenges to Jim Crow. Officials and everyday people feared that the problematic "third race" would undermine white supremacy. In response, Arkansas officials and southern congressmen backed the anti-Japanese crusade of their West Coast colleagues while adding their own segregationist slant. The controversy over Japanese American internees and troops reflected broader racial anxieties in the wartime South. While white leaders pointed to a Tokyo-led insurgency, the growing impatience of southern blacks and Japanese Americans with second-class citizenship spurred homegrown resistance.

The Japanese American experience in the South during World War II revealed the increasingly permeable borders of Dixie. Officials like Arkansas governor Homer M. Adkins felt confident that they could curry federal favor while forestalling a social upheaval that could compromise white supremacy. The wartime influx of Japanese Americans forced whites in the South to confront the precariousness of Jim Crow. This episode revealed the increasing inability of southern white leaders to defend the segregated status quo, even as it exposed their segregated society to comparisons with fascism. At the same time, in trying to make the Japanese Americans behave according to the Jim Crow script, white leaders foreshadowed the ways they would later react to the protests of the civil rights movement. First in Arkansas and then in Mississippi, whites granted Japanese Americans some privileges of whiteness to isolate them from African Americans. At the same time, whites discriminated against the Japanese Americans in explicitly racial terms. The debates among whites about what to do with the Japanese Americans reveal the underpinnings of the defense of segregation. At the same time, the limited dialogue between Japanese American leaders and more militant elements of the black press reveals an attempt to harness wartime rhetoric of freedom and equality for racial advancement. (4) Jim Crow figured prominently in this conversation as the embodiment of racial intolerance, discrimination, and violence. As the editor of an internment camp newspaper declared in 1944, "No American of Japanese ancestry wants to give his life for the preservation of Jap Crowism." (5)

Weeks before the announcement in early 1942 that Arkansas would host two internment camps, Little Rock already buzzed with news of a different sort of Japanese influx. As the federal government hastily hammered out a plan for relocating Japanese American civilians, the War Department debated what to do with Nisei--American-born children of Japanese immigrants--in uniform. Although the government suspended enlistment of Japanese Americans for almost two years after the Pearl Harbor attack, there were hundreds of Nisei already serving in the army before the nation entered World War II. By early 1942 the military had sent several hundred mainland Nisei soldiers to Camp Joseph T. Robinson in North Little Rock. (6) During February the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette repeatedly ran an announcement entitled "American-Born Japanese as Soldiers and Citizens." Camp Robinson officials appealed to the people of Little Rock to "show special consideration to several hundred American-Born sons of Japanese parents." Though the state's leading paper urged against "blind prejudice or unreasonable suspicion," some local whites soon raised a fuss. (7) On March 17, 1942, a group of white businessmen led by Hodson Lewis of the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce visited Camp Robinson. In a private meeting with Brigadier General F. B. Mallon, the civic leaders decried the growing number of Japanese American soldiers at the camp. (8) Lewis punctuated the protest by firing off a letter to Arkansas congressman David D. Terry, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "Our Little Rock people are very much disturbed over the rapid increase of Japanese soldiers at Camp Robinson," declared Lewis. He complained that there were "901 Japs" at the camp already, with more arriving every week. While assuring the congressman that his constituents were "good and patriotic citizens," Lewis warned that the federal government was taking advantage of Arkansan hospitality. "[T]here are very grave social problems arising which are not only embarrassing but can become quite dangerous," declared Lewis. He mentioned the "co-mingling of Japanese soldiers and Negro women" and also suggested that white girls should not "dance with these boys without restrictions." With unintended prescience, Lewis worried that Japanese American families would follow the soldiers to Arkansas. The prospect of Japanese American settlement, Lewis concluded, was "not desirous" and potentially "hazardous." (9) While this voluntary emigration never materialized, Lewis's fear of a massive Japanese influx would soon become a reality.

In response to local complaints, General Mallon sent a confidential memo to the War Department describing the prickly situation in Arkansas and warning the top brass of the potential for greater unrest. "Every effort is being made by me to induce the leaders in Little Rock to approach the question from a patriotic viewpoint," Mallon asserted. The general praised the conduct of Japanese American soldiers but feared that "one unfavorable incident on the part of an individual would be sufficient to ignite the flames that are now smouldering among the alarmed civilians." Mallon asserted that the concerns of local Arkansans had more to do with "delicate social problems" than with possible sabotage. "It appears," he concluded, "that the fear on the part of the residents of Little Rock lies in their belief that any equality shown to the Japanese by white people may result in the negroes in this vicinity increasing their demands." (10)

Indeed, the Camp Robinson controversy reflected wider concerns about maintaining white supremacy. As General Mallon concluded, "the Japanese question here presents much less of a problem than that of the Negro." (11) Just days after the tense meeting at Camp Robinson, a white policeman gunned down a black army officer on the streets of Little Rock. When the African American community demanded an investigation, the Little Rock Arkansas Democrat dismissed the protests as a "campaign by the black press and the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) to use the war to undermine white supremacy on the home front." (12) Although the murder had no direct connection to the Japanese American presence, white city leaders worried that growing black militancy might attract the sympathies of Nisei troops. Bill Hosokawa remembered that local African Americans frequently remarked to Japanese Americans that "colored folks has got to stick together." Perhaps this was why Lewis and his cohorts warned General Mallon that Nisei servicemen were "infiltrating colored areas in Little Rock, and making social contacts therein." (13) While military officers at camp headquarters downplayed the simmering controversy, pressure from local leaders may have persuaded the military men to find an alternate base for a unit of Hawaiian Nisei scheduled to arrive that summer. Historian Masayo Umezawa Duus suggests that racial tension in Little Rock was "one of the reasons, even if not the main reason, why the 100th Battalion [Hawaiian Nisei] was sent to Camp McCoy [Wisconsin] even before barracks had been built for them." (14) This transfer, however, would prove to be a small victory for Arkansans anxious about a growing Japanese American presence in the state.

Less than a month before the Little Rock businessmen took their grievances to Camp Robinson, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, which established the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Soon uprooted Japanese Americans would be moved from the crowded assembly centers of the West Coast to isolated relocation centers farther inland. Although the WRA established most of its ten camps in the intermountain West, the Army Corps of Engineers also selected two swampy tracts of land along the snaking banks of the Mississippi River. Given that most of the WRA sites lay on arid plateaus or barren deserts, the temperate and fertile Arkansas Delta sounded like a promising, if stubborn, prospect. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) boasted that the Arkansas internees would "grow food for America's victory effort" after clearing the "near-primeval forests" of the Delta. (15) However, the dense vegetation and boggy soil had resisted encroachment for centuries. Overwhelmed at the prospect of draining and clearing the densely wooded swampland, landowners had sold the underdeveloped and tax-delinquent land to the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. When plans to relocate impoverished farm families fell through, few developers jumped at the chance to rehabilitate the marshy wilderness. After decades of difficulty and frustration, the abandoned lands fell into the open hands of the newly formed WRA. (16) Just twenty-six miles apart, the proposed sites at Rohwer and Jerome sprawled over twenty thousand acres. (17)

When WRA officials notified Arkansas governor Homer M. Adkins of their plans in early 1942, the former Ku Klux Klan candidate adamantly opposed the proposals. Realizing the futility of stubborn resistance, Adkins opted for a strategy of compromise and cooperation. Through negotiations with WRA director Milton Eisenhower, Adkins hammered out the "specific conditions" of internment in Arkansas. The governor arranged for a formal request from Washington that Arkansans accept Japanese American evacuees "as a patriotic duty." Furthermore, Eisenhower promised that the Japanese Americans at Jerome and Rohwer would be confined to the camps and that the pay for interned workers would not exceed the normal wages for similar labor in the area. Finally, Eisenhower assured Adkins that the internees would be removed immediately at the end of the war. (18) Representative William F. Norrell, whose congressional district included both camps, echoed Adkins's demands that the evacuees stay behind barbed wire. When he learned that a small portion of the Jerome Relocation Center spilled over into his home county, Norrell rose to address his fellow congressmen. "They may have [U.S.] citizenship," he declared, "but I did want to make it plain for the record that we would certainly expect the Japanese to be kept under guard." (19) In addition to their other demands, Governor Adkins and his advisers were "insistent that these camps be guarded by white troops." (20)

While state officials insisted that the Japanese internees have as little contact as possible with surrounding communities, attempts to enroll college-aged Nisei in Arkansas colleges and universities posed another threat to the color line. Many states, including every state with an internment camp except California, agreed to cooperate with the National Japanese Student Relocation Council. Governor Adkins, however, consistently refused federal requests to allow Japanese American students to enroll in Arkansas universities. A staunch segregationist, Adkins argued that allowing Nisei to enroll at Arkansas colleges and universities would provide an "entering wedge" for African Americans. When the governor discovered that the council had contacted several Arkansas schools, he quickly telegrammed Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy and suggested that Nisei students enroll "in those parts of the country where minority groups are already well represented." At Adkins's prompting, state commissioner of education Ralph B. Jones contacted the presidents of the state-supported colleges and universities. Some of the college presidents suggested subsidizing "some weak or defunct denominational school" to accept the relocated students. (21) When the president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College at Monticello discovered that his school had been inadvertently added to a list being circulated by the council, the embarrassed administrator quickly declared that "my school does not want any Japs." (22) Other Arkansas colleges and universities followed suit and publicly denounced the student relocation proposals. The racially charged nature of the education controversy was made plain when the University of Arkansas offered correspondence courses to German and Italian war prisoners incarcerated in the state. (23)

As state and federal officials hammered out the terms of relocation, Arkansas's white citizens reacted to the impending influx of Japanese Americans. Adolph Goldsmith, a columnist in the Dermott newspaper, blasted state leaders for allowing "Japanese infilteration" [sic] and "shoving off several thousand Japs on the people of southeast Arkansas." Predicting that the internees would "like Arkansas and want to stay," Goldsmith worried that "a nucleus of several thousand Japs" would outnumber local whites. (24) While resentment was especially acute in southeast Arkansas, whites across the state openly decried the WRA proposals. "It seems that Arkansas has been chosen for a dumping ground for all that is undesirable," declared a Little Rock woman, speaking of the "disreputable throng proposing to settle right in our beautiful state." (25) Backers of camp construction reminded local citizens of their duty as Americans and promised protection for the surrounding communities. One local paper claimed that the Japanese would improve the stubborn land "seven to 15 times." Hoping to allay local concerns that the internees would settle and farm the land after the war, the McGehee Times explained that the "[n]atural traits of the Japanese tend to make them peddlers, tradesmen and workers in crafts." (26) The McGehee Association of Commerce endorsed the WRA plans in hopes that camp construction would boost the local economy. Within weeks, government workers began arriving to build the camps, packing towns like Dermott and McGehee with hundreds of new patrons. (27)

Jerome and Rohwer had similar layouts of barbed-wire fences and guard towers surrounding five-hundred-acre compounds. Inside the imposing perimeter, construction workers hastily erected residential barracks as well as schools, hospitals, and recreational facilities. The projects fell behind schedule due in no small part to the intensive labor required to drain and clear the sites. When the first Japanese Americans arrived at Rohwer in mid-September and at Jerome in early October, they discovered works in progress. After a cramped cross-country train ride, the first waves of evacuees went to work building facilities and clearing land. (28) As the initial group of internees settled into their tarpaper barracks, controversy erupted over the establishment of camp schools.

White supremacy legitimized a complicated structure of racialized job categories that relegated African Americans to the bottom rungs of the economic and social ladder. The WRA officials at Jerome and Rohwer ran afoul of the racial caste system when they actively recruited white Arkansas teachers. (29) Local whites complained that the higher salaries at Jerome and Rohwer were luring teachers away from local schools. WRA officials pointed out that their teachers would have to work twelve full months in difficult circumstances to earn those extra dollars. Nevertheless, paying teachers more money to teach Japanese American students upturned the local etiquette of white privilege. As a "school friend" from Hope wrote, "[f]ull-blooded American children are being robbed of their teachers while they remain to teach the Japs." The Desha County chapter of the Arkansas Education Association refused to accept members from Rohwer, and local teachers received threats that teaching at the camps would jeopardize their future employment opportunities in area schools. (30)

The labor crisis brought on by wartime mobilization and outmigration prompted some Arkansans to request the opportunity to employ nonnative workers, but Governor Adkins saw no reason to change his strict policy of Japanese American containment. Arkansas employers experimented with Bahamian migrant workers and even hired German and Italian inmates from local camps for prisoners of war (POWs), but Adkins maintained his "implacable opposition" to Japanese contract labor. (31) Planters in Mississippi and Louisiana also eyed the untapped labor pool just over the state line, but concerns over racial disruption clashed with economic interests. When planters in the Mississippi Delta requested Japanese American farmhands, a prominent local banker warned that "instead of having one racial problem we will have two." (32) Harry Itaya, a California vegetable farmer interned at Rohwer, contacted planters in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, to offer to recruit other internees to work on local farms. Alarmed local citizens, however, warned that the relocated California vegetable farmers would "take over the parish." (33) Just as educational access threatened the social order, the labor question underscored the dilemmas presented by a third racial category. Since labor in the South was dictated by the color line, the internees could muddy the distinction between labor appropriate for blacks and work more suited to whites. Digging ditches or picking cotton was seen as natural work for blacks, but working construction or factory jobs was not. If Japanese Americans did both types of work or made higher wages, it would blur the categories in this racialized labor system. So as German and Italian POWs worked for employers throughout the region, Japanese Americans toiled exclusively behind barbed wire. (34)

One of these "unfortunate loyal Americans" blasted Governor Adkins shortly after he refused to allow Japanese internees to work on a federal dam-building project in northern Arkansas. Calling Adkins's statements "Hitlerian in every respect," the anonymous Japanese American "ex-U.S. soldier" denounced the governor for his counterproductive racial preoccupations. "When you refuse an American to work in the war effort, thereby hindering production in any way, you are a saboteur, and a saboteur of the worst kind," declared the interned veteran. "And if it is your fear that we might get involved in your messy social system, then banish that fear, for we are too intelligent, too well educated, and too Americanized to have any part of it." (35)

Despite such fiery denunciations of southern racial practices, Jim Crow forced Japanese Americans to navigate a social system in which their status was ambiguous at best. As historian John Howard points out, Japanese Americans regularly confronted and contested the color line. Despite the wishes of local white leaders and concerned government officials, Japanese American internees frequently ventured outside the Arkansas camps. A daily pass system allowed many internees to visit nearby towns, and camp directors granted longer leave for Japanese Americans to visit Little Rock and travel outside the state. (36) Realizing the futility of strict isolation and containment, white leaders adjusted Jim Crow to temporarily accommodate Japanese Americans. "The whites," recounted Bill Hosokawa, "insisted that the Japanese Americans sit in the front of the bus, drink from the white man's fountain and use the white man's rest rooms." (37) Aimed at absorbing a potential threat to the southern racial binary, this temporary solution was not only ambiguous but also occasionally volatile in practice.

As internees readied for their first Arkansas winter, a violent round of events erupted. In early November a construction company guard at Rohwer wounded three Japanese boys with a blast of birdshot. The guard claimed that the boys were throwing rocks at him. (38) Five days later Private Louis Furushiro stopped in Dermott on his way to visit his interned sister. William M. Wood, an elderly white farmer with two sons in the military, heard there was a "Jap" in the cafe. He strode in with a shotgun and fired at the soldier. Furushiro ducked the squirrel shot but suffered powder burns to his face from the point-blank blast. (39) The next day a deer hunter came across a group of internees working in the woods near the Rohwer camp. M. C. Brown, a McGehee farmer, yelled at the three men to halt. When they did not respond, Brown fired his shotgun, hitting Shigeru Fukuchi in the leg and hip. Convinced that the internees were escaping, apparently with the help of the white government engineer who was supervising them, Brown marched the men to the home of the local deputy sheriff. Finding no one at home, Brown borrowed a neighbor's truck and drove his captives to McGehee. Expecting a hero's welcome, the overeager vigilante instead landed in police custody. (40)

Concerned that harsh punishment of the attackers would aggravate local tensions, WRA officials avoided vigorous prosecution of the three attackers. "There is no doubt that public opinion was against a conviction and heavy penalty," explained Rohwer project director Ray D. Johnston, "and consequently we felt that compromise was not too great a defeat." (41) The guard and the two local attackers got off with small fines. While Japanese Americans could not count on vigorous protection from jittery whites, an isolated report of black aggression provoked a swift and severe response. In early December a black laborer allegedly solicited a female internee and grabbed her coat on the outskirts of the Jerome camp. While there was little evidence of assault or attempted rape, the local magistrate sentenced Nebo Mack Pearson to one year in prison and fined him a hundred dollars. The high penalty effectively doubled the sentence, since the indigent laborer would have to work off the fine at the county farm. Camp security officers and local authorities increased their patrols "to prevent any similar occurrences." (42)

But the stark contrast in law enforcement revealed to Japanese Americans the boundaries of Jim Crow. Whites were custodians rather than equals, and African Americans were below them, a caste of untouchables. Isolation from local blacks bolstered the legitimacy of white authority, helping to cement a relationship that hinged on control and containment. Although white authorities granted Japanese Americans a status above local blacks on the racial hierarchy, the whites had no intention of treating Japanese Americans as equals. Meanwhile, Japanese Americans would have little contact with African Americans, even as their superiors. In terms of educational and employment opportunities, German and Italian POWs had more access to southern society than interned Japanese Americans did.

Although WRA officials hoped the outbreak of anti-Japanese violence would encourage greater sympathy for the internees, negative rumors about the Arkansas camps increased in early 1943. After a week spent snooping around Jerome, Eugene Rutland of the Memphis Commercial Appeal announced on January 3 that the camp was "a nest of sabotage and unrest." (43) WRA lawyer Robert Leflar dismissed Rutland as a disgruntled former federal employee who had been passed over for a job at Jerome, but several regional and national papers carried the story. (44) The New York Times reprinted Rutland's allegations of "[c]areless and deliberate waste of food, slowdown strikes, refusal to work and threats against government workers...." (45) The Rutland expose, which ran less than a week before the start of a session of the Arkansas General Assembly, primed Little Rock for an onslaught of anti-Japanese bills. In early December 1942 Governor Adkins wrote California's secretary of state for help in crafting property restriction legislation. "It is my understanding you have a statute in California that prevents certain races, including Japanese, from owning land in your state," inquired Adkins. "I would appreciate having a copy of this statute." (46) During the first week of 1943 the Little Rock Real Estate Board announced it would seek measures to prohibit the sale of real estate to Japanese Americans. (47) On January 12 state senator Frank Williams introduced a land restriction bill to ensure "that no Japs can stay in this state" alter the war. The bill aimed to protect private property in the state because, "'on account of the standards of living of the Japanese people, a white person can not profitably compete with the Japanese." (48) One week later C. B. Ragsdale introduced a companion bill, modeled on similar statutes in California, Arizona, and Nebraska. Both bills forbade anyone of Japanese descent, citizen or alien, from ever owning land in the state or renting property for more than a year. "I don't think anybody wants a Jap to stay in Arkansas," declared Ragsdale. "If I had my way, we'd put 'em all on a ship and then have that ship torpedoed." (49)

Ragsdale made clear that the land restriction bills targeted the interned Japanese Americans, but he conceded that the several hundred Chinese American residents of Arkansas would suffer from the racial restrictions. (50) The vast majority of them had lived in the Arkansas Delta for decades, working as merchants and forging a middle ground within segregated society. (51) Now their hard-earned advancement was jeopardized by the anti-Japanese fervor sweeping the state legislature. Although the Ragsdale bill was not retroactive, it would prevent Chinese from acquiring property in the future. According to the backers of the land restriction legislation, "there was no way of exempting them." (52) Delta Chinese leaders Feng Erxue and Feng Wenjun led a vigorous campaign against the legislation, petitioning state leaders and contacting Chinese diplomats in Houston and Washington. They persuaded a handful of Delta legislators to challenge the land restriction measures, but anti-Japanese sentiment was nearly unanimous. (53) While Ragsdale's companion bill sputtered out, Williams's original land restriction proposal passed both houses of the state legislature with only one dissenting vote. (54)

A week later, the state senate bitterly debated a proposal to bar all members of the "Mongolian race" from white public schools. Again, several Delta legislators defended their Chinese neighbors against what Marianna legislator W. L. Ward deemed "cruel and unfortunate" restrictions. (55) While some legislators suggested rewording the legislation to pertain specifically to persons of Japanese descent, the bill's original sponsor warned that by basing the statute on nationality rather than race, the Senate would set it up to be ruled unconstitutional. (56) Skin color, argued state senator Dick Mason, was the cornerstone of legalized segregation, and a law aimed at a nationality rather than a racial group would not stand up under judicial review. White southerners had long pointed to the genetic and cultural backwardness of blacks to justify Jim Crow, but the debate over exclusion of the "Mongolian race" from educational and economic opportunities rested ultimately on skin color. During the debate over the bill, Senator Mason put it bluntly: "I know none of you gentlemen think Negroes ... are as good as your children[,] and I don't think any member of the yellow race is as good as my children or yours...." (57) While many legislators sympathized with this sentiment, the Mason bill failed to pass.

Although the school segregation bill did not survive its revisions, Governor Adkins signed Williams's land restriction bill into law on February 13, 1942. The Japanese American reaction was swift and furious. "Arkansas Joins the Axis," announced the editor of the Pacific Citizen, citing "an example of race legislation every bit as reprehensible as the worst of Hitler's anti-Semitic decrees." The JACL organ blasted the state legislature, claiming that it "could not have done more harm to the progress and extension of democracy here and everywhere had it acted under the personal bidding of Goebbels or Tojo." Invoking the worldwide struggle against fascism, the Pacific Citizen warned that "[t]he Axis has scored a major victory in Arkansas and has established a beachhead of race hatred in the Ozarks." The editorial staff declared that they "would not be surprised to see the swastika of the 'master race' flying over the state" capitol. "Each day such an evil law remains on the statute books of an American commonwealth," declared the editor, "sharpens the doubts of other non-white groups, particularly the Negro and the Chinese, as to the sincerity of American war and peace aims." (58)

The WRA correctly predicted that the Williams bill would eventually be ruled unconstitutional, but the message sent by the Arkansas legislature sounded clear. (59) The anti-Japanese fervor of the Pacific states complemented the segregationist mores of the Jim Crow South. Anti-Japanese politicians from the West Coast found many eager allies among southern segregationists. Tennessee senator Arthur Thomas Stewart maintained that Japanese Americans were "utterly unassimilable, utterly different in every respect from Americans." (60) He raged against traitorous "yellow devils" and urged Congress to strip away their civil rights. "I say that wherever there is one drop of Japanese blood that there is absolute Japanese treachery," declared Stewart. "I do not believe there stands today on the face of the free soil of the United States of America one single solitary Jap, one single solitary person with Japanese blood in his veins, but what there stands a man who will stab you in the back." (61)

In the House, John E. Rankin of Mississippi wove anti-Japanese invective into his virulently white supremacist rhetoric. Even though it seemed odd for a Mississippian to claim intimate knowledge of "the Japanese problem," Rankin had long perceived the threat that Asian America posed to Jim Crow. Indeed, he had nervously eyed Hawaii and its large Japanese population for over a decade. He sponsored a 1933 bill that would have appointed nonresidents to important territorial positions in Hawaii, attempting along with other southern segregationists to frustrate the statehood aspirations of the multiracial island society. (62) Since the outbreak of World War II, Rankin had argued vigorously for single-sex "concentration camps." Countering charges that forced removal was excessively harsh and without precedent, Rankin reminded the chamber that Andrew Jackson had treated Native Americans in a similar fashion "to avoid further trouble." The Mississippian felt strongly that the nation "should follow Andrew Jackson's example now." (63) Rankin followed closely the reports of sabotage and lenient treatment at the Arkansas camps. Shortly after Rutland's inflammatory expose made headlines, Rankin delivered a speech in Congress entitled "Quit Coddling the Japs." (64) Like Stewart, Rankin painted all persons of Japanese descent with the same broad strokes of innate treachery and racial inferiority. "You cannot regenerate a Jap, convert him, change him, and make him the same as a white man any more than you can reverse the laws of nature," fumed Rankin. "Damn them! Let us get rid of them now!" (65)

Anti-Japanese sentiment clearly transcended sectional boundaries. Southern congressmen, however, employed the same volatile rhetoric that had bolstered Jim Crow for decades. During World War II, apocalyptic rumors of black violence experienced something of a revival. In his wartime study Race and Rumors of Race, Howard W. Odum cataloged fantastic tales of African Americans hoarding guns, explosives, and even ice picks for an impending race war. (66) White supremacists had long used images of bestiality and depravity to justify violence and discrimination against African Americans, and World War II presented another outlet for racialized rhetoric. Some of the anti-Japanese attacks sounded eerily familiar. Senator Stewart evoked images of predatory sexuality and imperiled white womanhood when he claimed that Japanese servants and laborers in Hawaii "spied upon housewives." The marauders were so "insolent and impudent," Stewart declared, that white islanders "had no peace of mind, and were constantly in fear." (67) Representative Rankin raised the specter of miscegenation. "[I]f my views are carried out, we will never mongrelize America and drag her people down to the level of the Japanese," he declared. The anti-Japanese campaign was not simply a reaction to possible sabotage and subversion, Rankin argued, but also a strategy to escape "the implacable mire of mongrelism." (68) Despite Rankin's professed familiarity with "the Japanese problem," claims that Mississippi was in imminent danger of invasion seemed far-fetched. On February 3, 1943, however, Rankin declared that he was "shocked beyond expression" to learn that several thousand Nisei troops were training in his home state of Mississippi. (69)

Army officials had quietly been making plans for a new Japanese American fighting unit for several months before Rankin criticized their efforts from the floor of the House. Unbeknownst to the Mississippi congressman, two dozen prewar draftees from the 100th Batallion had been on a top-secret "mission" in the state for weeks. Months after the Hawaiian Nisei had been rerouted to Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, a small segment of the 100th Batallion headed to Dixie as dog bait. To test their theory that dogs could be trained to detect "Jap" blood, the army sent the Nisei troops to "pollute" an uninhabited Gulf Coast island with their supposedly distinctive racial scent. The men spent three months being hunted by army dog trainers on Cat Island. "When the dog spotted us, the trainer would fire a shot and we would drop dead with a piece of meat ... in front of our necks," remembered Yasuo Takata. "The dog would eat the meat and lick our faces. We didn't smell Japanese. We were Americans. Even a dog knew that!" (70)

The formation of an all-Nisei fighting unit proved to be a more successful military experiment. On February 1, 1943, President Roosevelt announced the formation of the 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team. Over the next month, military representatives distributed enlistment questionnaires to the young men at the internment camps. Those who were willing to sign a loyalty oath became eligible for military service. In early March a representative of the War Department visited the Arkansas camps to push the plan. He argued that the newly formed all-Nisei combat unit would help counter the "poisonous venom" of anti-Japanese legislation and negative press. (71) While the Pacific Citizen admitted that there was an "understandable fear of anything which smacks of racial distinctions," the JACL adamantly supported Nisei enlistment. Many were offended by the absurdity of signing a loyalty oath and volunteering for service from behind barbed wire, but others quickly signed up. (72)

Like the Arkansas internment camps, Mississippi's Camp Shelby perched on drained swampland. The sprawling army base hosted more than 100,000 troops during World War II, and nearby Hattiesburg grew with the base. The small yet bustling city maintained strict segregation and glaring inequality. In the African American section of Hattiesburg, black military police officers patrolled with nightsticks while white military police officers carried pistols. Like the Little Rock businessmen before them, white city leaders worried about the impact of several thousand Japanese troops on the color line. As historian and Hattiesburg native Arvarh E. Strickland notes, "white Hattiesburg had to deal with a third element in a society built for two." (73)

City officials adopted the Little Rock strategy of classifying Japanese American soldiers as "white," informing Camp Shelby that Nisei soldiers could patronize establishments and use facilities barred to blacks. As in Arkansas, white leaders discouraged contact with the black population. Although some soldiers struck up friendships with African American soldiers, regimental historian Thomas D. Murphy notes that "after a discussion among battalion officers and subsequent talks with the men this practice stopped." (74) Local officials prohibited Nisei soldiers from entering black neighborhoods and socializing with local African Americans. Strickland, a boy at the time of the controversy, notes that "Hattiesburg blacks seemed to find this situation more ludicrous than a cause for resentment." (75) For Japanese Americans the hospitality of white Hattiesburg was inconsistent at best. The children of a handful of Japanese American officers could not attend local white schools. When their parents balked at the prospect of sending them to the dilapidated schools set aside for black pupils, the Hattiesburg School Board quietly set up a one-room schoolhouse for Japanese American children. (76)

The anti-Japanese outbursts of Mississippi's most notorious congressman further undermined the limited hospitality of white Hattiesburg. "[T]he appeasing of Japanese by people in this country is a horrible blunder," fumed Rankin, "and sending these Japanese into the South where we do not want them is worse." Protesting this "injustice to the people of Mississippi and the other Southern States," Rankin asserted that the all-Nisei combat team at Camp Shelby was "teeming with spies and trouble makers." Alluding to "other concerns which I prefer not to mention," Rankin initially attempted to frame his anti-Japanese invectives in terms of domestic security. But after listing southern military installations, industrial sites, and oil fields, Rankin launched into a litany of racial anxieties. He claimed that a "Black Dragon Society" was fomenting racial antagonism throughout Dixie. "We people in the South have had enough race trouble stirred up for us already," fumed Rankin, without having "these Japanese troops ... in the Southern States." (77)

While southern congressmen warned of a "'Black-Yellow' Axis," JACL leaders were making different kinds of connections with the African American struggle for equal rights. In November 1943 JACL president Saburo Kido attended a speech by Howard University's Alain Locke at the University of Utah. Noting that westerners rarely had the opportunity to meet "scholarly Negro leaders," Kido reminded readers of the importance of attention to "the Negro question" since it would "supplant the Japanese issue as soon as the war hysteria subsides." Alluding to the wartime migration of African Americans to the West Coast, Kido declared that "the Negroes will be the next victims of the vicious California race-baiters." (78) Kido's warning resonated three weeks later when Fred Howser, the Los Angeles district attorney, told a local African American newspaper that "there will be trouble" if Japanese Americans returned to Little Tokyo. The Pacific Citizen blasted the outspoken opponent of resettlement for attempting "to incite Los Angeles' new Negro population against persons of Japanese ancestry." (79) Since the evacuation, an empty Little Tokyo was losing ground to the booming black enclave of Bronzeville. Indeed, while thousands of Californian evacuees were penned up in southeastern Arkansas, many Delta blacks were fleeing the area for the defense industries of the West Coast. For race-baiters like Howser, the massive displacement of wartime America provided a convenient foil for their anti-Japanese crusade.

Japanese American activists were not the only ones to respond to the attacks and accusations put forth by southern congressmen. Although many civil rights groups ignored the plight of Japanese internees, a few militant voices within the black press explicitly linked internment and Jim Crow. The Chicago Defender refuted rumors of "'Black Dragon' societies" and blasted the FBI for "its combing of Negro areas for mysterious spy gangs." While conceding that "[a] certain amount of hysteria seems incumbent in any war," the Defender declared that "the effort to envision a 'Black-Yellow' Axis is way off the beam." Refuting the notion of a pro-Japanese conspiracy, the Defender stood up for the internees and invoked images of Jim Crow violence. "As Americans, the Negroes have but one genuine concern for the Japanese," the newspaper argued. "That relates to the native-born Nipponese of the West Coast who today are as much the victims of racial prejudice as any Negro in the South." The Defender denounced "the Pacific Coast witch-hunt that differs little from the Rankin-brand anti-Negro propaganda in the South," and the writer dismissed wartime internment as "pure and simple discrimination along racial lines." Now that Japanese Americans were attempting to return to their homes, they faced "a wild, furious wave of race-baiting on the Coast that rivals a lynching bee in Mississippi." For African Americans who failed to see the correlation between anti-Japanese discrimination and southern segregationist ideology, the Defender offered a frank warning. "There is much cause for alarm amongst Negroes in this wave of bitter, angry race-baiting," warned the editor. "Just as we in the past have had occasion to warn Jews and Catholics that Dixie fascists would vent their spleen on them as well as Negroes, Negroes would do well to remember that they will be next to feel the fascist hate that is now directed against the Japanese." (80) As the Defender warned of discrimination on the home front, its own Japanese American columnist decried racist intimidation at southern army bases. Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, a Canadian-born professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and a future California senator, denounced the attempts of military officials in Alabama and Mississippi to prevent black newspaper circulation on army bases. When representatives of the Defender visited Camp Rucker, white officers and military policemen confiscated their papers and "chased" them off. "This is not the first story of this kind that has been wafted northward by the soft and somewhat evil-smelling Southern breeze," declared Hayakawa. "Anti-negro elements," he added, had taken similar steps against black newspaper salesmen at Camp Shelby. (81)

Amid the racial rumblings at Camp Shelby, the 100th Battalion scrambled to prepare its dilapidated quarters for hundreds of new recruits. The prewar draftees drilled during the day and spent the evening repairing barracks, digging latrines, and clearing land. (82) Their inauspicious initiation to life at Camp Shelby showed that support for the growing Nisei unit was limited even within the military. As Nisei soldiers mended sagging floors and leaky roofs, Lieutenant General John L. Dewitt declared to a San Francisco reporter that "[a] Jap's a Jap ... it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not." Echoing Rankin's congressional tirades, the head of the Western Defense Command argued that Japanese Americans were a "dangerous element." (83) As Dewitt spoke with reporters, a boatload of Japanese American volunteers from Hawaii sailed into the San Francisco Bay.

Before the three thousand Nisei recruits had even left Hawaii, some officials lobbied unsuccessfully to divert the training site out of the Deep South. According to historian Franklin Odo, some Hawaiian leaders feared that sending Japanese American troops into the South would expose them to discrimination and possible violence. (84) During the five-day train ride to Hattiesburg, officers briefed the men on the racial situation in the South, emphasizing that the races were separated in all aspects of life. "If you get friendly with the Negroes," warned one officer, "the white people will be antagonized." (85) When soldiers asked how they fit into the southern racial scheme, they were told to put themselves "in the white category." (86) While military officials and white Hattiesburg had already determined that this was the answer to the racial dilemma posed by the Nisei soldiers, expecting the Japanese to "act white" proved a shaky solution.

Openly suspicious of whites, Hawaiian Nisei had experienced white domination and the plantation economy before ever setting foot in Mississippi. Their contempt for the racial customs of the South reflected their Hawaiian roots. As Hideo Nakamine later recalled, "We were not afraid of the white man.... We from Hawaii didn't tolerate abuse." (87) After a Nisei soldier was thrown out of a white post exchange, future Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye recounted that "a couple hundred of us marched on the place with blood in our eyes. The MPs had to call up a couple of tanks to turn us back." (88) Alarmed whites occasionally harassed dark-skinned Hawaiians who were simply following orders to stay on the white side of the color line. When a soldier knocked Eddie Kaholokula to the ground for standing in the white line at a Hattiesburg movie theater, Hawaiian Nisei soldiers chased the attacker yelling, "He's not black!" (89)

Tension between Nisei and white troops led to numerous scuffles on base, and racial confrontations extended into Hattiesburg and beyond. When the Japanese American soldiers boarded Jim Crow buses, they frequently witnessed the abuse of African American soldiers and civilians. On one occasion, a white driver in Hattiesburg kicked a black serviceman from behind as he was leaving the bus. As the passengers looked on in awe, a Hawaiian soldier sprang forward and pummeled the terrified bus driver. On another occasion, Mike Tokunaga was on leave in New Orleans when a bus driver pushed an elderly black woman to the ground. "I grabbed the bus driver by the shirt and dragged him off the bus," recalled Tokunaga. "Six of us kicked the hell out of him for knocking that poor black woman down." (90) Though excursions into southern towns and cities rarely led to violent confrontations, temporary leave allowed Japanese American soldiers to witness the abuses and indignities of Jim Crow across the region. "A weekend pass to Jacksonville reminded me of the serious gap between democratic ideals and reality," recalled Robert Sakai, a member of the Military Intelligence Service who trained at Camp Blanding in Florida. "The discrimination I had experienced as a Japanese American was largely a product of wartime hysteria," he noted, "while the degrading treatment of blacks in the South had persisted for generations." (91)

As Nisei soldiers navigated their way through segregated society, acts of defiance occurred frequently. Hattiesburg citizens complained that Japanese American soldiers were riding with the black passengers in the back of the city buses, and camp headquarters received numerous complaints that Japanese soldiers were using black restrooms and water fountains. While white officers ordered the men to observe local rules, some continued to flaunt local customs. "It was beyond our power to change it," recounted Joseph Hattori, "so when we sat in the back of the bus on purpose, we were making a statement." (92) While some Nisei soldiers prided themselves on their defiance, local African Americans chuckled under their breaths at the predicament of white city officials. "My community especially enjoyed the reports of conflicts between men of the 442nd Regiment and white bus drivers and policemen," recalled Arvarh Strickland. "White Hattiesburg, we were sure, breathed a sigh of relief when the 'Go for Broke' Regiment was shipped to Europe." (93)

As Jim Crow fueled feelings of isolation and resentment among Japanese American troops, the mixed reactions of Arkansas internees to the war effort revealed the growing discontent at the "quiet camps." Jerome and Rohwer had gained a reputation for relative tranquility, but many residents were losing patience. Moreover, the introduction in February 1943 of the military's registration and enlistment program, which asked internees to attest to their loyalty to the U.S., was poorly timed at camps still reeling from several anti-Japanese attacks and malicious rumors. The resulting controversy among offended Japanese Americans aggravated tensions within the camp community. Government officials, however, attributed the tension at Jerome to its large number of Japanese Americans from Hawaii. Although the WRA ultimately evacuated only a small percentage of Hawaiians, a disproportionate number of them ended up in Arkansas. Camp administrators, like the white residents of Hattiesburg, discovered that many of the Hawaiians did not hide their dissatisfaction with second-class citizenship. At Jerome, reported WRA officials, "Hawaiians were 'unwilling workers,' and half of them answered 'no' to the loyalty question" on the selective service registration form. In response to such reports, the WRA requested that Hawaiian evacuation be suspended to avoid further problems. (94)

While the outspoken Hawaiians caught the attention of WRA officials, the growing restlessness at the Arkansas camps was not limited to the islanders. In early March several hundred men at Jerome presented the project director with a petition for repatriation to Japan. (95) Several days later Senator Albert Chandler, chairman of the Military Affairs special committee, visited Jerome and called for "more rigid restrictions" at the camp. (96) Meanwhile, Joe Oyama of Jerome wrote the Pacific Citizen to announce that the "resettlement bug" had struck in Arkansas. The desire to leave the center was increasing, due in no small part to the growing frustration of the internees "in the dismal swampland south of the Mason-Dixon." In addition to the "copperheads, rattlers, and water moccasins just coming out of their winter hibernation," Oyama cited the anti-Japanese venom spewing from Little Rock. He reminded readers of the shootings and the rumors spread by regional and national newspapers that "built up within the evacuees a resistance, and some hostility, to the outside." The combination of an unhealthy environment, anti-Japanese sentiment, and cabin fever contributed to the growing desire "to escape the center, and the south in general, where the reception has not been too favorable." (97)

The turmoil over the loyalty oaths did result in many internees leaving Arkansas, but they were not headed for home. During the summer of 1943 the WRA transferred allegedly disloyal internees and their families to the Tule Lake Relocation Center in California. While most camps sent just a few hundred "segregants" to Tule Lake, Jerome lost more than a quarter of its population in the wake of the controversial registration program. Rohwer sent far fewer, but it still lost several hundred residents to Tule Lake over the summer. In fact, more than 30 percent of all segregants brought to Tule Lake were from the Arkansas camps. (98) After the transfer of a third of Jerome internees to Tule Lake, the depleted population kept shrinking as the WRA scattered the remaining residents among the other relocation centers. On June 30, 1944, Jerome became the first relocation center to shut down. It soon reopened as Camp Dermott, a special POW "camp for 'fanatical pro-Nazi' German officers." (99)

The growing discontent among Japanese Americans at the Arkansas camps reflected the volatile racial politics of the home front. Many southern whites feared that increasingly mobile and vocal racial minorities threatened American security. Texas congressman Martin Dies Jr., chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, implicated Japanese Americans in a national investigation of wartime race riots. Dies ordered the seizure of JACL files and specifically cited Japanese agents as fomenters of disorder and violence in Detroit. John Rankin stood squarely behind Dies, declaring Japan's "racial cohorts" in the United States were "stirring race trouble" between blacks and whites across the nation. (100) In an editorial, the Jerome camp newspaper chided the Dies Committee for "meretriciously poisoning the minds of uninformed people.... The Dies men's imagination would put creators of ghoulish characters in pulp magazines to shame." (101)

As Dies fueled anti-Japanese fears, Arkansas internees expressed anxieties of their own. A WRA analyst at Jerome noted that internee leaders feared that "the Japanese Americans will always be in danger of gross discriminatory acts" and "pictured this group as having a similar status as that of Negroes." (102) A counterpart at Rohwer noted that elderly Issei (first-generation immigrants) "wish[ed] particularly to avoid resettlement in southern states where they think the 'caste' system may categorically place them in a position inferior to that of Caucasians." (103) In another report, WRA analyst Charles Wisdom noted that internees believed that the "unchangeable caste system" would "depress them as a minority group to the social and economic level which they believe the Negroes now are." (104)

Time in Dixie had ambiguous implications for Japanese American attitudes toward blacks. While talking with a visitor from Camp Robinson, one young Rohwer internee was struck by the Nisei soldier's "perfect Southern drawl" and his changed racial outlook. "He says he was deeply sympathetic of negroes when he first came here," noted the internee. However, the soldier remarked that after his time in Little Rock, he preferred "to steer clear of the whole lot of them." (105) When many Arkansas internees headed north rather than return to their native West Coast, a Chicago landlord warned the Pacific Citizen that their "Jim Crow tendencies" could hinder their resettlement. "[T]he Nisei maintain an extremely rigid and well-developed racial prejudice against brother Americans who are Negroes," she noted, adding that "a majority of homes offered to the WRA Housing Department have been from Negroes on Chicago's South Side." (106) In an editorial entitled "Nisei and Jim Crow," the Pacific Citizen cautioned against segregationist sentiment: "While it is only natural, perhaps, for nisei to take on the regional habits and customs of the areas into which they go, just as southern nisei speak with a southern accent, one might expect they would think twice before accepting the racial prejudices of these new areas." (107) After reading both editorials in the Pacific Citizen, George S. Schuyler of the Pittsburgh Courier praised the paper for its attention to anti-black prejudice. "A certain amount of anti-Negro prejudice is to be expected among Japanese Americans, especially among those exposed to American miseducation," declared Schuyler. "They are Americans and modern Negrophobia is peculiarly American." However, the editor of the black weekly hoped "that the terrible experiences of the past year and a half had the effect of changing the views of many nisei on this and many other questions." (108)

The discontent with so-called Jap Crow that proved difficult to manage in Arkansas and Mississippi led to outright resistance at another southern army base. In March 1944 reports of a "Jap revolt" at Fort McClellan, Alabama, hit the headlines. Although many Japanese American soldiers had been sent to Camp Shelby, other Japanese units were scattered across the country. Many of these prewar draftees performed menial duties such as collecting garbage and digging latrines. When the draft was reinstituted for Japanese Americans, about six hundred of these troops assembled at Fort McClellan for retraining. Most of them were Kibei, American-born Japanese who had received most of their formal education in Japan. Shortly after their training began, the men staged a sit-down demonstration to protest "continued displays of disrespect and attempts at humiliation" by the military as well as the internment of their families. (109) More than a hundred troops declared that they would continue the strike until officials in Washington addressed their grievances. The 442nd dispatched one of its two chaplains, George Aki, to persuade the men to end their strike. After a speedy investigation, twenty-eight men were court-martialed, and twenty-one were eventually sentenced to serve five to thirty years of hard labor at Fort Leavenworth. The rest of the strikers were absorbed into the 442nd and the 100th Battalion. (110)

Pointing to the "thousands upon thousands of Negro troops" who were willing "to serve for the democratic traditions they may not, themselves, enjoy for some time to come," the Pacific Citizen denounced the "outrageous and disgraceful act" as a betrayal of Japanese American servicemen overseas. While conceding that the incident stemmed from discrimination, the paper maintained that soldiers "cannot bargain for the grant of their personal rights." (111) Japanese American leaders were not the only ones running damage control in the wake of the strike. The white USO clubs of Anniston, Alabama, invited Japanese American soldiers from Fort McClellan "to make themselves at home." The Anniston Star, the paper that had announced the "Jap revolt," printed an editorial entitled "Japs and Japanese Americans: A Distinction" as ambivalent evidence of the community goodwill. Melton Clark of the Anniston USO Council expressed confidence that "the God-fearing people" of the town would treat the several hundred Nisei soldiers with courtesy and respect. (112)

Although some leading whites attempted to defuse the racial powder keg with gestures of goodwill, others maintained their opposition to this problematic presence. During May 1944 Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes ran into William Norrell, the Arkansas congressman who had vehemently opposed the relocation of Japanese Americans into his congressional district. In "a somewhat heated exchange," the congressman reminded Ickes of his obligations to the people of Arkansas. "We had three [Japanese Americans] during the last census," declared Norrell, "and I want to say to you, sir, that we are expecting you to leave only three Japs in Arkansas when the war is over." (113)

Norrell may have considered Japanese internment an episode to be forgotten, but turning back the clock would prove impossible. The anxieties and turmoil of the wartime South reflected the changes that were penetrating every corner of Dixie. More and more concerned with managing the color line, segregationists saw a visible Japanese American minority as a threat to the increasingly slippery status quo. Ardent white supremacists like John Rankin claimed common cause with the anti-Japanese forces on the West Coast. When Representative John Phillips of California presented a petition protesting the return of Japanese American internees to the West Coast, Rankin raised the specter of social equality and federal intervention. "Not only are they going to return the Japanese to California," Rankin warned, "but the chances are the FEPC [Fair Employment Practices Committee] will try to make you accept them on terms of equality." (114) As southern segregationists geared up for a postwar fight for the preservation of Jim Crow, they sought allies through explicitly racial appeals.

With all the wartime talk of interracial subversion and the threat of social equality, it often seemed that white leaders were more interested in a "Black-Yellow" connection than either African Americans or Japanese Americans were. Nevertheless, the presence of Japanese American troops and internees in the South put into motion diverse pressures that further exposed the vulnerability of segregation. Japanese American leaders and a vocal minority within the black press linked Jim Crow and "Jap Crow," highlighting the experience of Japanese Americans in the South as an example of the increasing incompatibility of southern racial practices with American war rhetoric. While this dialogue reflects only one aspect of the complicated relationship between Japanese Americans and African Americans, it reveals that the South became a common point of reference in the wartime struggle against racial discrimination. The displacement of Japanese Americans and the continued exodus of southern blacks from the Jim Crow South prompted confrontations with the broader racial dilemma facing postwar America. Shuji Kimura discovered this during the summer of 1944 as she traveled from Colorado to a WRA camp in California. Heading back to the camp at Tule Lake, she met a young African American woman from Memphis who was traveling to the Navy Hospital in Brigham, Utah. The woman's husband had been wounded off the coast of Australia. When the bus stopped for breakfast in a Utah town, no restaurants would serve her. The hungry woman handed her new Japanese friend a quarter. "Will you buy me a sandwich?" she asked. "I thought of her traveling all the way from Memphis alone," recounted Kimura, "I thought of her husband wounded in action. Our 'Democracy' has a long ways to go yet." (115)

(1) Bill Hosokawa, "Notes on Jim Crow in the Deep South," Salt Lake City Pacific Citizen, March 10, 1945, p. 5. For an account of Hosokawa's journey from Wyoming to Iowa, see Bill Hosokawa, Out of the Frying Pan: Reflections of a Japanese American (Niwot, Colo., 1998), 47-62. For their guidance and encouragement, I would like to thank