(1985 UPI photo)
This is not Gordon Hirabayashi Day. Coincidentally it is the feast day of a Japanese citizen of Japan. Gordon Hirabayashi was an American citizen of America. However during World War Two he was treated as an enemy alien, as were many Americans of 1/16 or more Japanese ancestry. FDR signed an executive order to intern thousands of people from the West Coast states in camps that the British during the Boer War called "concentration camps". But Gordon Hirabayashi was not sent to one. He objected. And at the time he lost his case, and was sent to the prison camp on Mount Lemmon, Arizona, north of Tucson, where we went hiking today. The site is now Gordon Hirabayashi Campground, administered by the U.S. Forest Service.
Sent - in fact, told to report. He thumbed his way from Seattle, where he was a senior at UW, via relatives in Idaho (them indeed inside an internment camp) and reported to the CO of the Mount Lemmon Camp. They did not know quite what to do with him; while the CO searched for the paperwork he went to the movies. Then he was in camp.
Years later he won his case. The discrimination on the basis of race during a time of war hysteria was recognized as unconstitutional - during the Reagan Administration. When the campground was dedicated, Dr Hirabayashi attended.
This is one story among thousands. But it is his. And now it is ours, to know and remember.
Gordon Hirabayashi Campground
https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=25648
Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi, American civil disobedience advocate (born April 23, 1918, Seattle, Wash.—died Jan. 2, 2012, Edmonton, Alta.) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gordon-Kiyoshi-Hirabayashi
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/us/gordon-hirabayashi-wwii-internment-opponent-dies-at-93.html
