Tag: oral history
Announcing SCIP’s Oral History Agreement Toolkit: Protecting Narrators and Improving Institutional Rights Administration
The Scholarly Communication & Information Policy (SCIP) office is pleased to announce the release of our Oral History Agreement Toolkit—a collection of templates, guidance documents, and resources that we created to help institutions approach oral history agreements.
The Oral History Center participated in the process to help SCIP to develop this toolkit. These agreements were developed specifically to meet the legal requirements of UC Berkeley. For guidance on letters of consent and legal agreements more broadly, especially for independent oral historians, please consult the Oral History Association’s best practices.
Why We Created This Toolkit
Over the past two years, SCIP worked to improve oral history agreements in ways that we believe:
- Conform to current Oral History Association Best Practices, including flexibility on signing timeline preferences
- Resolve the “version of record” as between edited and unedited audio and transcripts
- Ensure consistency in representations to narrators, by having an integrated agreement
- Address privacy and defamation
- Standardize terms
- Define use and access rights by the institution in the event that narrators pass away or disengage after completing the interviews
- Resolve ambiguities for downstream granting of usage permission and licenses by the institution
Generally speaking, past approaches to oral history agreements have often created an imbalance between narrators and institutions. Our new toolkit addresses this by:
- Centering narrator agency and control over their stories and how they’re shared;
- Improving rights administration for libraries and oral history programs;
- Providing clear, accessible language to explain complex legal concepts; and
- Creating flexibility through multiple agreement options that accommodate diverse needs.
What’s Included in the Toolkit
There are two key documents in the toolkit:
SCIP created both of these documents as training materials we presented to the UC Berkeley Oral History Center, but we believe they may be adapted, repurposed, and improved upon by other institutions.
The “Talking Points for Conversations” document is really the leading tool here, and includes:
- Agreement templates: Customizable templates covering a variety of narrator needs and signing scenarios (e.g. signing before the interview, signing after the interview, funded oral histories, deceased narrators, etc.);
- Explanatory Materials: Detailed talking points to help oral historians explain each clause in plain language;
- FAQs: Addressing common questions, including specific concerns for historically marginalized communities; and
- Sample Scenarios: Real-world examples showing how the agreements work in practice.
Key Benefits for Narrators
The template agreements protect narrators by ensuring they:
- Can review and correct transcripts before finalization
- May withdraw participation at any point before final approval
- Can restrict access to sensitive portions for specified time periods
- Retain the right to use their own stories regardless of copyright decisions
- Can request removal of identifying information about third parties
- Have clarity about their rights and responsibilities
Enhancing Institutional Practice
For libraries and oral history programs, the toolkit helps:
- Establish clear legal frameworks for rights management
- Reduce risk related to third-party claims
- Create flexible options for different interview scenarios and signing preferences
- Provide consistent language for explaining agreements to narrators
- Address complex situations like posthumous agreements and funded projects
Accommodating Narrator Requests for Modifications
A key principle underlying this toolkit is flexibility. The agreements can be modified to better reflect narrators’ comfort levels and preferences. If a narrator requests changes to the standard terms (additions, deletions, etc.), you can consider whether you are able to accommodate those requests.
In our case, we outline our own processes for:
- Modifications: Changes requested before signing
- Amendments: Changes requested after signing, including rights and embargo selections and substantive term modifications
Customization Is Expected and Encouraged
We recognize that institutions have diverse practices and needs. And we do not expect that these templates or materials will work for everyone!
In addition, institutions must make policy decisions even if they decide to utilize these materials. For instance, what range of embargo time periods are you willing to offer? Do you want to allow narrators to redact information once they’ve shared it? How do you wish to convey or encourage Creative Commons licensing options?
The toolkit is designed merely as a foundation—a starting point for important conversations about reforming oral history practices at your institution. We encourage programs to:
- Review the materials with institutional stakeholders, including legal counsel
- Adapt the templates to align with your specific circumstances and policies
- Use the talking points as a basis for developing your own communication strategies
- Consider the sample scenarios as illustrations rather than prescriptive examples
Getting Started
We invite you to explore these resources and consider how they might enhance administration of your oral history agreements. We believe the toolkit offers valuable perspectives on balancing ethical responsibilities to narrators with practical institutional needs.
As you begin to use these materials, we welcome your feedback at schol-comm@berkeley.edu. Your experiences and insights will help us continue to refine these resources to better serve the oral history community.
The Scholarly Communication & Information Policy (SCIP) office provides guidance on copyright, publishing, and information policy matters to support the research and teaching mission of our institution.
Richard Wyatt, Jr.: A Blessed Life of Art and Music
In February 2023, Dr. Bridget Cooks and I had the pleasure of interviewing the Los Angeles-based visual artist and songwriter Richard Wyatt, Jr., for the Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative. Wyatt was a joy to interview, making us laugh constantly and sharing what he called Forrest Gump moments, where he was in the right place at the right time to meet and collaborate with celebrities of all stripes.
A little over a year after this delightful interview, Bridget and I were saddened to hear that Richard had passed away in May 2024. The world has lost a kind and funny man, as well as an talented artist, musician, educator, and thinker.
While I continue to mourn Richard’s passing, I also want to celebrate his life by highlighting the wonderful stories he shared in his oral history about life, art, music, and seeking new challenges.
Richard Wyatt, Jr., was an artist whose work includes drawings, paintings, installations, and public art. Wyatt was born in Lynwood, California, in 1955, and lived in the Los Angeles area his whole life. He began his art career early, winning the Watts Chalk-In at twelve years old, and then studying at the Watts Towers Art Center, the Chouinard Art Institute, and the Tutor/Art Program with artist Charles White. Wyatt attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BFA in art. Some of his best-known work in Los Angeles includes the mural Hollywood Jazz: 1945-1972 on the Capitol Records Building; the mural City of Dreams, River of History in Union Station; and the installation Ripple of Hope at Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park. Wyatt taught drawing and painting at the University of California, Irvine; the Otis Art Institute; and the Watts Towers Art Center. He also had a career as a songwriter, writing songs for musicians like The Miracles, The Sylvers, and New Edition.
One thing that continues to strike me about Richard is the indelible mark he has left on the world—and I mean that literally. Some of Richard’s best-known work was his public art, which adorned buildings and other public places in the Los Angeles area and beyond. For this reason, Bridget found interviewing Richard almost surreal. In the oral history, she explained, “…your work is part of my Los Angeles,” for indeed, Richard’s public art shaped the city in which she grew up. After our first day of interviews, Cooks and I drove around Downtown Los Angeles, pointing out and visiting sites where Richard’s work dotted the landscape: Union Station, Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park, the Capitol Records Building, and on and on.
One of Richard’s most famous murals, Hollywood Jazz: 1945-1972, remains on the Capitol Records Building, although he later replaced the paint on this south-facing exterior wall with ceramic tile to combat the ravages of the sun. When Richard accepted the commission for this work, it was the perfect blend of his love of visual art and his passion for music. In this mural, he memorialized jazz greats, such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, and Nat King Cole. And in one of those Forrest Gump moments, Richard met musician Bonnie Raitt on site at the Capitol Records Building during his original installation. Listen as Richard recounted this moment:
Richard also mused about the role of an artist after unveiling a work of public art, sharing his thoughts on the impact of his public work: “…you can’t control it…Once it’s out there, it’s out there. People are going to interpret it and take pictures.” And while we spoke about the joys of creating art for wide public consumption, Richard also acknowledged some of the challenges inherent in this work. Listen as Richard shared about some of his public art work with collaborator and fellow artist May Sun:
Richard’s talent also extended to music, and resulted in a prolific career as a songwriter for musical artists such as The Miracles, The Sylvers, Peaches & Herb, Tavares, Johnny Gill, and New Edition. Richard wrote his first song, “Keep on Keepin’ On (Doin’ What You Do)” for The Miracles when he was just eighteen years old. But for Richard, visual art and music were always intertwined, as he experienced synesthesia, a sensory condition in which, among other things, allows some people see colors when they hear music. Richard explained his synesthesia this way:
“I didn’t even know that term until somebody else told me…When I’m writing, that’s one thing. But once I start arranging it and getting the bass and guitar, and then you get strings and horns, there are certain sounds that have a color associated with them. I can’t explain it, but…I see colors once I hear a certain sound, you know? And when I’m creating the arrangements, or even mixing or whatever, and I’m going for a certain effect, it’s like once you get mixing, to me it’s like glazing in oil. That’s the easiest way I can explain it.”
Richard was a child prodigy who burst into the art world when he was twelve years old, rubbing elbows with more experienced art world talents like Charles White, John Riddle, George Evans, and Bill Pajaud. Yet, Richard carved out a career all his own. And while he left us too soon, Richard’s art lives on. To celebrate this remarkable man and artist, I suggest spending time in Downtown Los Angeles and experiencing the work of Richard Wyatt, Jr., for yourself.
To learn more about Richard Wyatt, Jr.’s, extraordinary life and work, explore his oral history!
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Berkeley SLATE-d for Back to School: Student Community in the Sixties
By Natalie Naylor
Natalie Naylor is a fourth-year undergraduate studying English and Creative Writing. She’s lived in the on-campus dorms, specifically Unit 2, and two Berkeley Student Cooperative properties during her time at UC Berkeley.
Well, it was magnificent! First of all, it was beautiful. I mean, Berkeley in the sixties was just a great place to be. It was very exciting; there were all kinds of new ideas. I loved my classes; I quickly made very good friends.
– Julianne Morris, SLATE Project
Berkeley in the 1960s is a time our campus and its surrounding community look back on with pride. During these years, UC Berkeley students, faculty, and community members participated in civil rights protests, antiwar activism, and, of course, the Free Speech Movement; these efforts are no doubt some of the most significant moments in Berkeley’s history. From the Mario Savio Free Speech Movement Café to the Martin Luther King Jr. Building and Free Speech Monument in Upper Sproul Plaza, the built environment referencing social activism in the sixties incorporates physical tributes to this time throughout UC Berkeley’s contemporary campus.
Sixty years later, as the Fall 2024 semester begins, it’s easy to feel as though that time in our history is completely removed from the present. However, students in the 1960s were concerned with issues familiar to UC Berkeley’s current student body: housing, humanitarianism, belonging, freedom of speech, and community building. This includes many of the members involved in the campus political group SLATE in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Oral History Center’s SLATE Oral History Project documents the experiences and budding political consciousnesses of some of the students involved in on-campus activism at UC Berkeley sixty years ago.
SLATE was a political party on UC Berkeley’s campus from 1958 to 1966 and, therefore, predated the Free Speech Movement. Its main goal: to present candidates for the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) office who supported racial equality and free speech on campus.
Jackie Goldberg, an undergraduate social science major in the mid-sixties, was one of the most well-known student activists involved in SLATE at UC Berkeley. She initially joined SLATE because of her passion for civil rights, as well as the strong community and support from other student activists on campus at the time. Her oral history is a part of the Oral History Center’s Free Speech Movement Oral History Project but chronicles the work she did with SLATE in detail.
When she arrived on campus, Goldberg underwent a year of dorm living—still a staple of the UC Berkeley freshman experience. After that first year in the dorms, she encountered a lack of housing on and around campus, which is a lasting issue at Cal. To secure housing for her second year, she participated in the sorority rush process and became a member of Delta Phi Epsilon. Goldberg claims that due to her Jewish background, most other houses declined to offer her membership. Experiencing this prejudice firsthand likely later influenced her activism in fighting discrimination in Greek life. In her oral history, she describes her housing journey as such:
I had applied to the co-op. I had applied to the dorms, and I didn’t get any of them. I was on the wait list for both. So my game plan was I would go in for a semester, try to grow up so I could get an apartment, find someone to get an apartment with…but it turned out that I was in this free-wheeling place, with a lot of nice people, some of whom are still my friends…and it was so easy. I didn’t have to cook, I didn’t have to clean, I didn’t have to shop, and it was cheap because I was doing the house bills.
Despite originally joining the sorority for housing reasons, Goldberg grew an affinity for the culture of her house and its lifestyle. In her oral history, she recalls: “I stayed all three years. I had no desire to leave.”
Goldberg thrived in community with other members of Delta Phi Epsilon and SLATE during her time at UC Berkeley. Her activist work and living situation occasionally overlapped, like while advocating for the racial integration of sororities at Cal. At the time, Greek life had a vast political presence on campus; Goldberg both embraced and challenged this precedent to incite political change at UC Berkeley. She succeeded in encouraging other sororities to desegregate, despite the decision sometimes diverging from their national organizations and sister-chapters.
Julianne Morris, another member of SLATE, had a less positive experience in an all-women’s housing arrangement around the University of California, Berkeley’s campus. While studying at UCLA, Morris founded the organization PLATFORM, inspired by conversations she’d had with members of SLATE. After craving more involvement in student politics, she transferred to UC Berkeley in the early 1960s and selected housing based on connections she’d previously made through SLATE. Morris recalls:
My first semester I was in a co-op, Stebbins Hall, and so I met a lot of women friends there. And of course, you know, it was very different then. There was a curfew, where you had to be in—and God forbid that there were any men there at night.
Even in the sixties, the University maintained in loco parentis authority over its female students from which it exempted male students. These unequal restrictions were especially apparent when it came to women’s housing accommodations. Because of this, although she found community both in SLATE and at Stebbins, Morris eventually sought more autonomy by moving to her own apartment after one semester in the co-op system. She explains:
Oh, I liked the idea of being freer. And you know, I hated having to come in at a certain time and no men in the house and the whole way things were at that time. And so I was very happy not to be in a dorm or a co-op anymore and be on my own.
Despite graduating sixty years ago, many of the buildings around UC Berkeley’s campus are part of a continuous built environment that would be physically recognizable to Morris and her peers.
In 2024, there are still two Berkeley co-ops designated for female-identifying students only, but no all-male-identifying cooperatives remain. One historically men-only house was Barrington Hall, which closed in 1989.
David Armor, a founding member of SLATE, lived in Barrington Hall while attending UC Berkeley, and participating in student government and campus activism. In 1959, he became the first and only member of SLATE to be elected as ASUC President. Armor describes his experience living at the student cooperative Barrington Hall during his freshman year as such:
Again, as a very poor student, I chose the cheapest housing, which was…a cooperative, Barrington Hall, terrible building, really not in good shape…there was a two-person bedroom, two two-person bedrooms, and then a one-person bedroom, so five people sharing a bathroom. And co-op means that you did the work…You work. You did the food, the serving, the cleaning, and everything, that’s how you paid, why the fees were so low. So you basically worked to provide all the services.
However, after a semester, Armor also decided to transition to an apartment. While making this change, he and his roommates integrated some of the cooperative practices they adopted from Barrington into their new living dynamic. Armor reports this influence as having a positive impact on his development as a young adult:
So we got an apartment in the second semester of my freshman year, and five roommates, and we divided up the chores, cooking and whatever, and that was a great experience, because we [were] becoming independent, and living on our own.
Armor’s desire for strong community and cooperation mirrors the effective practices of SLATE’s grassroots political advocacy approach. Housing was one of the main issues of SLATE’s political platform, and the group supported the Berkeley Fair Housing Ordinance in 1959. SLATE also opposed the University’s compulsory ROTC program for male freshmen and sophomores. Members defined SLATE by its beliefs in student organizations, advocacy, and the right for personal academic freedom on UC Berkeley’s campus and its surrounding areas. Communal living, even on an apartment scale, is still a method of community building for students at UC Berkeley. In addition, cooperative living situations are often regarded as financially accessible for a wide range of students looking for housing in Berkeley. Armor and other SLATE participants likely resonated with communal styles of living because of their political and personal beliefs, as well as their material needs.
Over the past sixty years, both Barrington Hall and the UC Berkeley chapter of the Delta Phi Epsilon sorority have closed; the physical structures where they were once housed are the largest reminders and evidence of their impact on campus. Stebbins Hall, Morris’s first housing experience at Cal, is still operational as a student cooperative, and has been co-ed since 1971. In short, the built environment since the time of the Free Speech Movement on Berkeley’s campus has both endured and been changed in ways that would feel substantial to former students and members of SLATE.
The activists highlighted here craved more autonomy and less censorship in both their campus and housing climates. They were able to socially campaign for their beliefs as a result of cross-community building practices. Goldberg, Morris, and Armor all lived in houses with a built-in social element; this was likely a great opportunity for idea-sharing and recruitment for SLATE’s cause, as well as a way to foster meaningful connections with their housemates. Their interviews reveal the importance and impact of these connections, as well as the places in which they were formed. What these narrators recall best from their time at UC Berkeley—outside of their work with SLATE—is not classes or grades, but instead the places they lived and the communities of people they built in those places. Indeed, Goldberg, Morris, and Armor’s individual memories of student-led activism and the communities that emerged from, and around, that work have remained strong sixty years on.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Freedom Summer and Its Legacy: Berkeley Sixty Years Later
By Sophia Faaland
Sophia Faaland is a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying history. They are an Undergraduate Research Apprentice and Archaeological Field Student for the Nemea Center. Sophia works at the Oral History Center as a student editor.
Freedom Summer in 1964 was a landmark moment in the Civil Rights Movement that challenged systemic racism in the United States. Activists—typically white, college-educated, and from Northern states—volunteered to travel to Mississippi and Louisiana to direct national media attention towards Jim Crow Laws and racist violence that prevented Black people from voting in Southern states. The ultimate goal of Freedom Summer was to end racial inequality in the Deep South, and ensure constitutional liberties for all people living in the United States. Organizations such as CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) all recruited, trained, and coordinated activists for Freedom Summer. Once there, activists faced the legacy of deeply-rooted systemic racism in the United States that had shaped elections.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, politicians in the American South designed excessively complex voter registration forms in order to privilege white people attempting to register over Black people—regardless of the quality of responses. For instance, forms without a dot above the letter “i” would be disregarded entirely if they were filled out by a Black person. To combat this, Freedom Summer activists provided workshops for Black residents to navigate deliberately unforgiving voter registration forms, and taught literacy classes in Freedom Schools.
This moment in history drew on decades of activism from the Black community, accelerating the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in August 1965. The integrated effort of Freedom Summer helped popularize the movement for civil rights legislation across the country, and reached many pockets of American society, including the UC Berkeley campus. On this sixtieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, it is important to acknowledge that the movement did not happen long ago. This recent, violent struggle for civil rights illustrates the aggressive power of white supremacy in American society and its persistence in American politics. UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center features interviews with narrators who experienced this critical moment in civil rights history firsthand. Their memories of civil rights activism include the period before Freedom Summer, during Freedom Summer itself, and the movement’s impact on UC Berkeley. The Oral History Center does not currently have any interviews of Black activists who participated in Freedom Summer.
Before Freedom Summer, UC Berkeley Professor Olly Wilson was a Black participant in civil rights activism across the United States. In the late 1950s, while working to obtain his bachelor’s of music at Washington University, he was also an active member of CORE, where he volunteered for test cases. Civil rights organizations frequently used test cases to prove racial discrimination and, subsequently, define new anti-discriminatory law. Wilson recalls the process of gathering evidence of racial inequality for CORE test cases:
What we would do is to have a Black person go into a hotel or restaurant by himself and he would either be served or not served. Then you’d have a Black and a white person go in and they would be served or not served. Then you would have a white person go in, the same white person go in by themselves, and you are both creating valuable data for legal challenges and pointing out the inanity of it all.
In 1960, Wilson accepted an academic appointment at the University of Florida A&M, and traveled to the Deep South with his wife, Elouise. On this journey, he witnessed Jim Crow laws in action and stark segregation for the first time. In his oral history, Wilson discusses Elouise’s experience of determining the correct car while transferring trains in New Orleans. He describes how segregation was discriminatory and nonsensical:
When she gets in the train, she notices that this is a brand new, beautiful, clean car, and she looked in the corner and nobody else was there but white folks, you know. So, she was wondering, “Well, maybe I am in the wrong car…” Now, Elouise is light skinned, and sometimes, if you don’t look at her right, you know, you might not know what race she is, you know. So, she was afraid people didn’t look at her right, so she came out, because she thought, “Well, if I get on this car and then Olly comes, they are definitely going to send him to the Black car, and I will be up here and he will be at that end…”
One year after the Wilsons’ journey to Florida, Freedom Riders boarded buses and trains through Mississippi to advocate for legislation ending segregation on interstate public transportation. In 1961, Mimi Feingold Real, a civil rights activist with CORE, was jailed for her participation in the Freedom Rides. Feingold Real recalls that the purpose of the Freedom Rides was to draw national media attention to Mississippi’s segregationist laws:
What we were doing—it was twofold, again—we were testing the system, doing a little stress test. But we were also, by the time I joined, we were also doing sort of a jail-in in Mississippi, that one of the ways to create pressure on the State of Mississippi was to have—first of all, to have all these Freedom Riders flooding into the state. But we all, as a condition of our being accepted, we had to agree that we would stay in jail for forty days. And that had to do with a quirk in the law in Mississippi, that you had forty days to post bail, and if you had not posted bail by forty days, you forfeited that right. So CORE was going to bail us out, but we were going to stay in that full forty days. That would force Mississippi, of course, to house us and clothe us and feed us and put up with all the national publicity that would arouse, and that would be one more way to pressure, at least the State of Mississippi, to discontinue this odious practice of segregated interstate transportation facilities.
Feingold Real extended her career in civil rights activism by continuing to work with CORE in Louisiana. She became a Freedom School teacher in the East Feliciana Parish teaching literacy, and showing Black residents how to navigate voter registration. In her oral history, she describes her philosophy of work as a Freedom School Teacher in 1963:
This wasn’t any sort of top-down endeavor, this is giving people the power to act on their own. It’s not trying to put pressure on the federal government to come in, and from the top-down force the white people in the South to do something that will allow Black people to do something else. I mean, in a way that was one of the ideas. But the basic idea was power to the people, giving people the initiative to make their own decisions and to have control of their lives. And that’s what I was doing on a person-to-person basis.
Chude Pamela Allen began participating in civil rights activism in 1964 when she heard the director of SNCC Freedom Schools, Staughton Lynd, speak in a seminar titled “Nonviolence in America” at Spelman College. Lynd inspired her to travel to Mississippi during Freedom Summer with the SNCC and help ensure Black people’s right to vote. She recalls the shift in political opinion about the protection of civil rights activists after the murder of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in June 1964:
And one of the first things we were then asked to do was to divide up by states, and then contact our parents and relatives to contact their congressmen and ask for safety for the civil rights workers. I did that, and my father did contact his congressmen. And later I learned, because his congressman—at least one of them called him up and said, “Get her out of there.” And my father who, as I’ve defined, was not what we think of as a political activist, but he said very clearly to his congressman, “This is not about her safety. It’s about all their safety.” That kind of shift—and that’s just, again, that reference to the fact that when you get involved in something, people around you can also have their own—they grow, too, or they can grow, depending on whether they support you.
To help combat social and political barriers Black activists faced, Freedom Summer activists were an integrated group. In her oral history interview, Allen reflects on adjusting to safety precautions in the Deep South, and becoming more aware of the nature of racist violence. Allen recalls that white activists did not always respect the danger integrated activism created for their Black colleagues during Freedom Summer:
I heard one story, as an example, of a white woman who did not want to hide on the floor under a blanket when riding in a car with a number of Black people, mostly men. I can remember the worker who then said he wouldn’t ride in a car with her anymore, because she insisted on sitting up. She insisted, “I have the right to be seen.” But of course, in that situation, she wasn’t the one that was going to get beaten to a pulp.
Even across the country, Berkeley students and university administrators felt the social and political repercussions of Freedom Summer. In 1964, UC administrators punished students exercising political speech that the university deemed unacceptable—beginning the debate on the limits of campus free speech. Prohibited topics of speech included civil rights and anti-Vietnam War advocacy. One of the first students arrested during the Free Speech Movement, Jack Weinberg, tabled in Sproul Plaza with CORE to raise money for civil rights work after returning from Freedom Summer activism in Mississippi. His arrest for speech on civil rights sparked a spontaneous sit-in protest around the police car detaining him that lasted thirty-two hours until he was released (seen in the first photo). Atop the police car at the protest for Weinberg’s release, Cal student Mario Savio gave a rousing speech to the crowd on the fundamental right to speech, and later became instrumental in organizing the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Savio had also returned from Mississippi for Freedom Summer before his organization of the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Thus, it was not a coincidence that the Free Speech Movement became a mass protest on the UC Berkeley campus the same year Freedom Summer occurred. This debate on speech and advocacy played a pivotal role in shaping the protections of student and faculty rights to free political speech at UC Berkeley today.
UCB professor Leon F. Litwack witnessed this shift in student activism at the beginning of the Free Speech Movement. In his oral history, Litwack remarks on the similar philosophies of Freedom Summer and the Free Speech Movement:
Of course, Mario Savio had just come back from the Mississippi summer when he came back to Berkeley in 1964. At places like Berkeley and other places around the country significant numbers of young people came to believe that direct personal commitment to social justice was a moral imperative and that social inequities are neither inevitable nor accidental but reflect the assumptions and beliefs and decisions of people who command enormous power, including the university administrators. Well, these were important perceptions. So what began at Berkeley as a protest to obtain a very traditional liberal freedom, freedom of speech and advocacy, soon brought into question the official version of reality.
In all, the legacy of Freedom Summer in 1964 is a historically significant moment that accelerated voting protections for Black people in the United States, and inspired the movement to protect free speech on all university campuses—starting at UC Berkeley. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 solidified the work of civil rights activists, and encoded anti-discriminatory practices into federal law. In the sixty years since Freedom Summer, Berkeley students have utilized their freedom of speech to address many other political issues, and as a result, the university has a reputation for vibrant political dialogue. The debate about the limits of free speech continues to this day as the University of California system grapples with Pro-Palestinian student activism. Indeed, on August 19, 2024, UC Berkeley announced its new policy for “expressive activity,” revising the previous agreements on freedom of speech for the coming academic year.
To learn more about the history of student activism at Berkeley, the Oral History Center collections include many other interviews, including the SLATE and Free Speech Movement oral history projects. For more information on women’s activism throughout the twentieth century, please visit the Women Political Leaders collection. To learn more about Black activists involved in the Civil Rights Movement and their legacies, see Charles M. Payne’s book I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Finally, the UC Berkeley Library holds a wide variety of secondary sources on Freedom Summer, available here.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Celebrating the Work of Freedom to Marry, Through Oral History
By Katie Gonzales
The Oral History Center’s Freedom to Marry collection features interviews from key members of the Freedom to Marry organization. Officially launched in 2003 by Evan Wolfson, the campaign worked to legalize same-sex marriage across the United States. The campaign originally worked on helping same-sex couples get married on a smaller case-by-case scale, as at the time, no state in the country had legislation protecting same-sex marriage. The first state to even do so was Massachusetts in 2004. Throughout the organization’s lifespan, same-sex marriage went from being legally unprotected on a state level to federally protected as an unequivocal right across the United States.
However, in June 2024, the Supreme Court countered this ruling in Department of State v. Muñoz, in which it declared that the right to bring a noncitizen spouse to the United States is not constitutionally protected. This ruling could be detrimental towards married same-sex citizens and noncitizens who would have to leave the United States, a country where their marriage is legal, back to a home country where it isn’t.
Given the June 2024 Supreme Court ruling, as well as this being Pride month, it’s a great time to look back on the work that Freedom to Marry did to legalize same-sex marriage. The lessons from the organization remain as important today as they were twenty years ago. When initially proposing the Freedom to Marry campaign to potential investors, Wolfson remembers:
I would be saying things to them like, look, if you just want to sprinkle some money around and do some ordinary building programs and helping people, I’m not the right person for you. And if you want to stay in your work up till now, which has been primarily in the Bay Area, and certainly only in California, not nationally, I’m definitely not the right guy for you. But if you really want to make a difference, what you really ought to do is support a campaign to win the freedom to marry. They went, “Marry?” “Yes, marriage. Marriage is the engine of change, marriage is what we’re going to have to be fighting for. You can do good work this way, but if you want to be transformational, you need to do this.”
One major battle that Freedom to Marry faced was when Proposition 8 passed in California. This ballot proposition intended to ban same-sex marriage measure passed in 2008. At the time, this was a massive blow to Freedom to Marry’s campaign, especially due to California’s reputation as a more progressive state. Tim Sweeney, a member of Freedom to Marry’s board of directors, recalls:
We were just devastated. It was devastating. Right? In California, the progressive beacon of the west, right? And we lost handily. It wasn’t close, which would have just taken a bit of the sting out of it. But what was interesting is the number of non-LGBT people who were outraged that their friends and family that they loved and cared about were basically being told you’re second-class citizens and your love is not legitimate. It created such a wave of we’re going to commit ourselves to fix this. And we have to be willing to be with them in their anger, invite them in in a new way, let them lead with us. All of that is hard to do, I think, in a social movement because you get worried they don’t really get it, their message is not your message, are they going to do some half measure, are they going to compromise, what do they know? But you got to kind of trust that they’re with you and you got to really in some cases step aside and realize, for instance, the message you may say to yourself or within the community is different than the one the non-LGBT community needs to hear. And maybe they need to have different messengers that just talk about the journey in a way that maybe an LGBT person wouldn’t sound authentic or real on. So that was just such an interesting moment. It’s almost like after Prop 8 we needed to step back a bit and let the world realize, “Wait a minute, what happened here? This is not okay.”
After the loss in California, support for LGBT rights increased due to the sheer amount of media coverage of the loss nationally. A Pew poll from 2010 cited that over 60% of Americans supported same-sex marriage, a drastic difference from polls in the 1990s that cited 60% of Americans against same-sex marriage. But by 2012, President Barack Obama made his support for same-sex marriage clear, stating that his views had “evolved” since his first presidential term. Thalia Zepatos, the Director of of Research and Messaging for Freedom to Marry recalls in her 2016 interview the impact of Obama’s statement:
I think really two things happened. One was that Governor [Martin] O’Malley really got involved in the campaign, but the big one was that our long-term effort to really engage the White House and President Obama came to fruition, you know not long before the election and President Obama made his statement in support of same-sex marriage, and within twenty-four hours, polling support for marriage among black voters in Maryland went up by twenty points. I mean, it was the biggest single day increase I’ve ever seen anywhere and I think it contributed just in a very great way.
By 2015, 37 states had legalized same-sex marriage, but it would not be a federal right until the Supreme Court case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which argued that same-sex marriage was a right under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court announced its ruling: same-sex marriage was guaranteed as a fundamental right. The same night, the White House was bathed in rainbow lights, an unmistakable show of support for the ruling. Jo Deutsch, Freedom to Marry’s federal director from 2011-2015, recounted this event:
It was a truth that, from every level, we had won. It was an acknowledgement from the President of the United States that our lives and our marriages mattered, in a just obvious way…This is the symbol of America and the symbol of the President of the United States, all in rainbow color. It was just breathtaking and so beautiful…We had come so far through our lives from asking can we walk down the street holding hands, or can we actually, in an introduction, say this is my wife? And now to this moment, there we were in front of the White House, in all of its colorful glory, with all of these people holding hands. I can’t tell you how many proposals we saw, with people just dropping to their knees right and left. It was like, another one dropping to their knees, and everybody started to clap. It was just phenomenal.
As the end of Pride month nears, it is important to remember that it hasn’t even been 10 years since the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. In many other countries around the world it is still taboo or even illegal. When we celebrate Pride month, it’s important to remember the work that many people and organizations did to ensure LBGTQIA rights, especially as they continue to face challenges. Celebrations can only happen as a result of triumph over tribulations, and should be remembered together.
Katie Gonzales is currently a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying English and Anthropology. She works as a student editor for the Oral History Center.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Bibliography for Trauma-informed Interviewing
In April 2024, the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives project team at The Oral History Center—Roger Eardley-Pryor, Shanna Farrell, and Amanda Tewes—had the opportunity to present about our project at the National Council on Public History conference in Salt Lake City. Since our presentation, we’ve gotten a number of questions about the literature we read related to trauma-informed interviewing, intergenerational trauma, and memory. Below is the bibliography we used, as well as some recent works. We hope this provides some guidance for your own work, and we’d love to hear from you if there are any articles or resources that have been helpful to you!
General
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Mary Marshall Clark, “The September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project: A First Report,” The Journal of American History 89:2 (September 2002): 569-579.
Mary Marshall Clark, “Resisting Attrition in Stories of Trauma,” Narrative 13:3 (October 2005): 294-298.
Lily Dayton. 2019 “Keep These Seven Lessons in Mind When Interviewing Trauma Survivors.” Center for Health Journalism. April 17, 2020. https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/keep-these-seven-lessons-mind-when-interviewing-trauma-survivors
Andrea Eidinger, “Trauma and Orality: New Publications on Mass Violence and Oral History,” Social History 49:98 (May 2016): 187-196.
Steven High, Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014).
Marianne Hirsch, “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory,” Discourse 15:2, Special Issue: The Emotions, Gender, and the Politics of Subjectivity (Winter 1992-93): 3-29.
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2012).
Mark Klempner, “Navigating Life Review Interviews with Survivors of Trauma,” Oral History Review 27:2 (Summer/Fall 2000): 67-83.
Selma Leydesdorff, “Oral History, Trauma, and September 11, Comparative Oral History,” in edited volume September 11th-12th: The Individual and the State Faced with Terrorism (2013).
Carmen Nobel. 2018. “10 Rules for Reporting on War Trauma Survivors.” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. April 17, 2020. https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/10-rules-interviewing-trauma-survivors/
Emma L. Vickers, “Unexpected Trauma in Oral Interviewing,” Oral History Review 46:1 (Winter/Spring 2019): 134-141.
Specific to Japanese American History
Jeffery F. Burton and Mary M. Farrell, “The Power of Place: James Hatsuaki Wakasa and the Persistence of Memory,” Discover Nikkei (June 13, 2021): http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2021/6/13/wakasa-1/
Jeffery F. Burton, Mary M. Farrell, Florence B. Lord, and Richard W. Lord, Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites (Tucson, AZ: Western Archeological and Conservation Center, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Publications in Anthropology 74, 1999).
Connie Y. Chiang, Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Roger Daniels, “Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans,” in Louis Fiset and Gail Nomura, eds. Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2005).
Roger Daniels, Sandra Taylor, and Harry L. Kitano, eds., Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress, Revised Edition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986).
Art Hansen, Barbed Voices: Oral History, Resistance, and the World War II Japanese American Social Disaster (Denver: University of Colorado Press, 2018).
William M. Hohri, Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese American Redress (Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 1988).
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020).
Stephen Holsapple, dir., produced by Satsuki Ina, Children of the Camps (Los Angeles, CA: AsianCrush, now Cineverse Corp., 1999).
Satsuki Ina, The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest (Berkeley, California: Heyday Books, 2024).
Donna K. Nagata, “Intergenerational Effects of the Japanese American Internment,” International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, edited by Yael Danieli (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), p 125-139.
Donna K. Nagata and Wendy J. Y. Cheng, “Intergenerational Communication of Race-Related Trauma by Japanese American Former Internees,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 73:3 (2003): 266-278.
Donna K. Nagata, Jacqueline H. J. Kim, and Kaidi Wu, “The Japanese American Wartime Incarceration: Examining the Scope of Racial Trauma,” American Psychology 74:1 (Jan. 2019): 36-48.
Donna K. Nagata, Jackie H. J. Kim, Teresa U. Nguyen, “Processing Cultural Trauma, Intergenerational Effects of the Japanese American Incarceration,” Journal of Social Issues 71 (2015): 356-370.
Lisa Nakamura “Seeking Meaning from the Past: Psychological Effects of Tule Lake Pilgrimage on Japanese American Former Internees and Their Descendants” (PsyD diss., Wright Institute Graduate School of Psychology, 2008).
Raymond Okamura. “The American Concentration Camps: A Cover-Up through Euphemistic Terminology,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 10:3 (1982).
Emiko Omori, dir., produced by Emiko and Chizu Omori, Rabbit in the Moon: A Documentary/Memoir about the World War II Japanese Internment Camps (Mill Valley, California, 1999).
Brandon Shimoda, The Afterlife Is Letting Go (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2024).
Karen L. Suyemoto, “Ethnic and Racial Identity in Multiracial Sansei: Intergenerational Effects of the World War II Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans,” Genealogy 2:26 (2018).
Stephanie Takaragawa, “Not for Sale: How WWII Artifacts Mobilized Japanese Americans Online,” Anthropology Now, 7:3 (2015): 94-105,
World War II-era Japanese American Incarceration: A Guide to the Oral History Center’s Work
Anthology created by the Oral History Center
Research by Sari Morikawa, Serena Ingalls, and Timothy Yue, undergraduate researchers
After the entrance of the United States into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, which mandated the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast into incarceration camps inland for the duration of the war. This forced removal uprooted families, disrupted businesses, and dispersed communities — impacting generations of Japanese Americans. The Oral History Center, or the OHC, and other archival collections in The Bancroft Library, feature several projects on this chapter of American history, comprising hundreds of interviews, photographs, artifacts, graphic illustrations, and podcasts for use by scholars and the public.
Find these interviews and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. You can search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Find all the oral history projects mentioned here, along with more in-depth descriptions, on our projects page.
There are six parts to this collection guide to Oral History Center and other Bancroft Library resources:
- Projects about Japanese American incarceration
- Related projects
- Individual interviews
- How to search our collection
- Selected articles that highlight and synthesize this work
- Acknowledgements
Part 1: Projects about Japanese American Incarceration
Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives
The Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project is the OHC’s newest project on this subject, consisting of interviews with child survivors and descendants of those who were incarcerated. The project documents the ways in which intergenerational trauma and healing occurred after the United States government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Conducted by Roger Eardley-Pryor, Shanna Farrell, and Amanda Tewes, these interviews examine and compare how private memory, creative expression, place, and public interpretation intersect at sites of incarceration. Initial interviews focus on the Manzanar and Topaz prison camps, and pose a comparison through the lens of place, popular culture, and collective memory. Exploring narratives of healing as a through line, these interviews investigate the impact of different types of healing, how this informs collective memory, and how these narratives change across generations. The first set of interviews, comprised of 100 hours of oral history interviews with 23 narrators, continues to grow with interviews featuring child survivors and descendants of the Heart Mountain and Tule Lake prison camps.
“‘Dad, were you put in the camps?’ They didn’t talk about it. It was something you didn’t bring up…. He was honest but then he said, ‘But that happened in the past. You don’t need to dwell.’”
—Peggy Takahashi, on intergenerational silence related to her family’s incarceration
The project includes interpretive materials as well. Season eight of The Berkeley Remix, the OHC’s podcast based on oral history, explores themes from the project’s initial oral histories. “‘From Generation to Generation’: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration,” is a four-episode season featuring stories of activism, contested memory, identity and belonging, as well as artistic expression and memorialization of incarceration. In addition, ten graphic narrative illustrations created by artist Emily Ehlen vividly express the experiences of Japanese American incarceration during World War II and its effects on future generations. The interpretive materials, along with the oral histories, are available for use in classrooms.
Japanese American Confinement Sites
Interviews in the Japanese American Confinement Sites Oral History Project document the experiences of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II, including UC Berkeley students who attended college before or after the war. Themes running through these interviews include the experiences of forced relocation and incarceration; loss of property and livelihoods; identity; education; challenges faced after the end of the war; and emotional responses to their experiences. Many of the narrators went into fields such as public service, the military, advocacy, art, and education; some of them participated actively in the redress movement.
“Never again should there be such an event as a mass removal of an entire group of people without due process of law. … I try to pass that message on to as many people as I can.”
—Sam Mihara explains why he decided to become a speaker and share his stories
The voices of these narrators are brought to life in the slideshow: “The Uprooted: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans.” This slideshow was made to accompany the 2021–2022 exhibition in The Bancroft Library Gallery, “Uprooted: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans.” All photographs were drawn from the War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement, 1942–1945, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, BANC PIC 1967.014–PIC. The oral histories are from the Japanese American Confinement Sites Oral History Project.
Japanese-American Relocation Reviewed
Japanese-American Relocation Reviewed is a multi-interview volume of oral histories from the Earl Warren in California project, dedicated to a discussion of Japanese American incarceration. In “Volume I: Decision and Exodus,” staff of the Justice Department, legal advisors to the US Army, and US and California State attorneys discuss the role of the US Department of Justice and the Western Defense Command in defining and administering policy towards enemy nationals, California Attorney General Earl Warren’s role in the forced removal of Japanese Americans to incarceration camps, the civil defense program, martial law, and the development of a constitutional argument for forced removal.
“We kept saying that we won’t do it and haven’t got the authority to do it. And there are enough precedents, you know with Lincoln suspending the writ of habeas corpus, that if the military wanted to do it, they could do it. But we frankly never thought they would. We thought they were too damn busy getting the troops to go fight a war some place else. That was our mistake.”
—James Rowe, assistant to United States Attorney General Francis Biddle
In “Volume II: The Internment,” members of the War Relocation Authority discuss the authority, selection, and administration of incarceration camp sites; resettlement out of the incarceration camps; origin and activities of the Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play. It also includes an appended interview with a wartime YWCA national board member on Idaho’s Minidoka camp in 1943; an address given by Robert B. Cozzens in 1945, “The Future of America’s Japanese;” and reproductions of Hisako Hibi’s paintings of Tanforan and Topaz.
The Office of Redress Administration Oral History Project
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, a historic piece of legislation that sought, for the first time, to provide a measure of justice to Japanese Americans forty-six years after their incarceration during World War II. Over its decade-long operation (1988–1998), the Office of Redress Administration reached over 82,000 people with a redress payment and official apology letter from the President of the United States. Redress: An Oral History Project, by Emi Kuboyama, project creator and interviewer, with Todd Holmes, Oral History Center historian and interviewer, documents the complex history of Japanese American redress. The film, Redress, provides the first in-depth look at the historic program as told by both those who administered and participated in it. Additional educational materials supplement the film by providing historical overviews of the Japanese American experience and redress program, as well as a list of resources for further study and discussion. The project received the generous support of the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Foundation and the National Park Service, US Department of Interior.
The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records and Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive
The Bancroft Library’s documentation of the Japanese American experience during World War II includes thousands of primary source materials drawn from an extensive collection of manuscripts, photographs, as well as audio and video. The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, accessible through the Online Archive of California, consists of surplus copies of U.S. War Relocation Authority agency documents, including publications, staff papers, reports, correspondences, press releases, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks and a few photographs. Included is the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, University of California, Berkeley, 1942-1946, containing diaries, letters and staff correspondence, reports and studies. These records include 250.5 linear feet (335 boxes, 84 cartons, 41 oversize volumes (folios), 7 oversize folders, 2 oversize boxes; 380 microfilm reels; 5,660 digital objects) (BANC MSS 67/14 c). The related Finding Aid to the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records 1930-1974 provides additional detail about the collection, including acquisition information, historic notes, scope, and contents.
In addition, Calisphere hosts the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA), which contains thousands of primary sources documenting Japanese American incarceration, including: personal diaries, letters, photographs, and drawings; US War Relocation Authority materials, including newsletters, final reports, photographs, and other documents relating to the day-to-day administration; and personal histories documenting the lives of the people who were incarcerated in the camps, as well as of the administrators who created and worked there. Curated by the University of California, JARDA makes accessible materials from libraries, museums, archives, and oral history programs across California.
Part 2: Related Projects
Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project
The Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project comprises more than 200 interviews with women and men about the home front experience in the Bay Area. Many of the interviews in these projects include either brief references to or longer discussions about the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans, and cover a broad range of experiences from a multiplicity of perspectives. Some interviews feature individuals who were incarcerated, while other interviews feature Japanese Americans in Hawaii and elsewhere who were not, but who recalled being affected by fear and prejudice. Other interviews include people who were friends, classmates, neighbors, and coworkers, who recalled the forced removal, and the emotions they experienced. Some of these acquaintances were troubled or appalled, whereas others were relieved and thought it justified. Some took care of farms and property until their neighbors returned; others benefited financially. Some go into great detail about race relations in farming and other communities throughout California.
“We used to say, now, why did they make all the Japanese pilots look so ugly?”
—Gladys Okada, in reference to World War II American war films
Volumes about Earl Warren
Two projects, Earl Warren in California and Law Clerks of Earl Warren, center around Earl Warren, who was California’s attorney general (1939–43) and governor (1943–53), before becoming chief justice of the Supreme Court (1953–69), and include an interview with Warren himself. The California project focuses on the years 1925–53, and documents the executive branch, the legislature, criminal justice, and political campaigns; Warren’s life; and changes in California during this period. The California project includes numerous multi-interview volumes that address different issues, including two volumes on labor, exploring Warren from the perspective of union members and labor leaders. The Law Clerks project comprises interviews of more than 40 of Warren’s law clerks; these narrators discuss watershed cases, the evolution of constitutional law, and other issues related to the court. Among other subjects, issues that arose in the interviews in these projects included the ways in which the narrators responded to the executive order; economic, military, and other motivations for the order; the process of identifying individuals and where they lived; reparations; economic consequences; and reflections on Warren’s actions and opinions. Earl Warren himself, in his interview, Conversations with Earl Warren on California Government, briefly addresses the incarceration and aftermath, including enforcement and other issues related to the Alien Land law, preparation of maps documenting where Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans lived, rationale for incarceration, reparations, and return from the camps.
“‘We urge you to appoint immediately a trustee to hold in trust all the properties of the Japanese in this state… lest they be taken over by the wolves.’ They didn’t do anything. All the wolves came in and took over their property.”
—Richard Perrin Graves, executive of the League of California Cities and member of the Ninth Regional Civil Defense Board, on his telegram to the US attorney general
Related Papers
The Bancroft Library and greater UC Berkeley Library have extensive collections that address Japanese American incarceration during World War II and related matters. Here are a few. The complete files of the Fair Play Committee (Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play) are held in the library and include a comprehensive file of newspaper clippings from West Coast publications. The papers of Senator Hiram W. Johnson have information on land laws and Asian immigration. Senator James D. Phelan‘s records document anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1920s. The papers of Robert W. Kenny, who succeeded Earl Warren as attorney general in 1943, have information on law enforcement questions in the aftermath of forced relocation.
Part 3: Individual interviews
“We can’t deny that the black people who lived in the Western Addition moved into places that were vacated because [of] the Japanese Americans who were put into internment camps. Our relationship with Japanese Americans is somehow affected by that history.”
—Carl Anthony, architect and environmental justice activist
Dozens of individual interviews scattered throughout the Oral History Center archive, with people from different backgrounds and walks of life, also detail many facets of this chapter in history. Although they were interviewed about other matters, the narrators in their oral histories in some way addressed Japanese American incarceration — sometimes only in passing, at other times more in depth. Some of the more well-known narrators include the following. Photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange discuss the artistic process, the ownership of their photographs, and the conditions in the camps. Willie Brown, speaker of the California Assembly and mayor of San Francisco, and Carl Anthony, architect and environmental justice activist, address race relations and how some black communities may have benefited from the forced relocation of Japanese Americans. Thomas Chinn, a historian and publisher of the Chinese Digest, discusses the evolution of race relations between Chinese and Japanese Americans in the United States, and noted that after Pearl Harbor, some people in Chinese communities wanted to distinguish themselves in order to avoid the same fate. Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa details her father being taken away by the FBI, her family’s subsequent incarceration, and the role incarceration played in her development as an artist.
“All this equipment my father had gathered — the books, everything that had to do with Japan — they just made a big bonfire and burned all of that. Everybody had panicked at that time. My sister cried and she said, ‘Oh, please don’t, don’t burn the books.’”
— Ruth Asawa, artist, on the fear her family experienced after her father was taken away
The best way to find individual OHC interviews that address any subject is to search by keyword from the search feature on our home page. Use as many keywords as you can think of (one at a time) that might relate to the topic. When you get to the results page, you will see a list of oral histories. Click on any one to get to detailed metadata about that oral history, plus access to the PDF of the oral history itself. As a first step, the abstract provides an overview of the major themes in the oral history. For a more comprehensive look, you can open the oral history directly from this page within digital collections; then use the search feature from within the oral history to find keywords. The oral history will also have a table of contents, and some also have an interview history and other front matter that will provide more information.
Part 4: How to search our collection:
Browse and access all of the oral history projects mentioned in this collection guide from the Oral History Center’s projects page. The projects page will provide a description of the project, and a list of all the oral histories on that project in the UC Library’s digital collections. To search the OHC’s archive by name, keyword, and other criteria, go to the OHC search feature on our home page. The OHC’s guides to various subjects in our collection can be accessed from the collections guide page. If you’re interested in making a documentary, podcast, or in undertaking other creative endeavors, you can access the audio/video and any related photos or ephemera through The Bancroft Library. You will need to open an account to order and access materials in the Reading Room. And here is more information about Rights and Permissions.
Explore collections related to Japanese American incarceration during World War II at all UC campuses by going to the UC Library Search. To explore all holdings from The Bancroft Library, go to the Advanced Search option from the Library Search page, and check “UC Berkeley Special Collections and Archives,” then search by keyword and other criteria.
Part 5: Selected articles that highlight and synthesize this work
The Oral History Center Presents the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project, by Shanna Farrell
The Oral History Center Presents The Berkeley Remix Season 8: “‘From Generation to Generation’: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration” by Amanda Tewes
Graphic Narrative Art by Emily Ehlen from OHC’s Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project, by Roger Eardley-Pryor
Q&A with Artist Emily Ehlen on Illustrating the OHC’s Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project, by Roger Eardley-Pryor
New podcast series explores the legacy of Japanese American incarceration: Read a Q&A with the Oral History Center’s Shanna Farrell about the Project, by UC Berkeley News reporter Anne Brice
‘I knew I had to draw it’: Illustrator brings to life testimonies of Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII and their descendants in new Oral History Center project, by Dan Vaccaro, writer for UC Library Communications
Interconnections, by Roger Eardley-Pryor
Out of the Archives: Patrick Hayashi: From Mail Carrier to Associate President to Artist, by UC Berkeley undergraduate research apprentice Zachary Matsumoto
OHC URAP Student Zachary Matsumoto Reflects on Work with Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project, by UC Berkeley undergraduate research apprentice Zachary Matsumoto
‘Never again’: Library exhibit tells story of WWII Japanese American incarceration, sounds alarm on importance of remembering by Dan Vaccaro, writer for UC Library Communications
Oral history project highlights the little-known Japanese American redress program, by UC Berkeley News reporter Anne Brice
Redress: A film about the Office of Redress Administration by Edna Horiuchi in Discover Nikkei
Janet Daijogo: Japanese Incarceration and Finding Her Place through Aikido and Teaching, by UC Berkeley undergraduate and Oral History Center research assistant Deborah Qu
Bury the Phonograph: Oral Histories Preserve Records of Life in Hawaii During World War II, by UC Berkeley undergraduate and Oral History Center editorial assistant Shannon White
Part 6: Acknowledgements
National Park Service, Department of Interior
The following projects were funded, in part, by a grant from the US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the US Government. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute their endorsement by the US Government.
Japanese American Confinement Sites Oral History Project
Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project
Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records
Office of Redress Administration Oral History Project
Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Foundation
The Office of Redress Administration Oral History Project received generous support from the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Foundation. The foundation also provided generous support for a second phase of interviews for the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project.
About the Oral History Center
UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center, or the OHC, is one of the oldest oral history programs in the world. We produce carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed oral histories and interpretive materials for the widest possible use. Since 1953 we have been preserving voices of people from all walks of life, with varying perspectives, experiences, pursuits, and backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you would like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. The Oral History Center is a predominantly self-funded research unit of The Bancroft Library. As such, we must raise the funds to cover the cost of all the work we do, including each oral history. You can give online, or contact us at ohc@berkeley.edu for more information about our funding needs for present and future projects.
Sign up for the Oral History Center’s Advanced Institute (August 5–9)
The UC Berkeley Oral History Center is pleased to announce that applications are open for the 2024 Advanced Institute!
The OHC is offering online versions of our educational programs again this year.
Advanced Institute: M–F, August 5–9, 8:30 a.m.–2 p.m., via Zoom
We are now accepting applications for our 2024 Advanced Institute on a rolling basis. Please apply early, as spots fill quickly.
The Oral History Center is offering a virtual version of our one-week Advanced Institute on the methodology, theory, and practice of oral history. This will take place Aug. 5-9, 2024.
The institute is designed for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, university faculty, independent scholars, and museum and community-based historians who are engaged in oral history work. The goal of the institute is to strengthen the ability of its participants to conduct research-focused interviews and to consider special characteristics of interviews as historical evidence in a rigorous academic environment.
We ask that applicants have a project in mind that they would like to workshop during the week. All participants are required to attend small daily breakout groups in which they will workshop projects.
In the sessions, we will devote particular attention to how oral history interviews can broaden and deepen historical interpretation situated within contemporary discussions of history, subjectivity, memory, and memoir.
Apply for the Advanced Institute.
Overview of the week
The institute is structured around the life cycle of an interview. Each day will focus on a component of the interview, including foundational aspects of oral history, project conceptualization, the interview itself, analytic and interpretive strategies, and research presentation and dissemination.
Instruction will take place online tentatively from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific time, with breaks woven in. There will be three sessions a day: two seminar sessions and a workshop. Seminars will cover oral history theory, legal and ethical issues, project planning, oral history and the audience, anatomy of an interview, editing, fundraising, and analysis and presentation. During workshops, participants will work throughout the week in small groups, led by faculty, to develop and refine their projects.
Participants will be provided with a resource packet that includes a reader, contact information, and supplemental resources. These resources will be made available electronically prior to the institute, along with the schedule.
Applications and cost
The cost of the institute is $600. We are offering a limited number of participants a discounted tuition of $300 for students, independent scholars, or those experiencing financial hardship. If you would like to apply for discounted tuition, please indicate this on your application form and we will send you more information.
Please note that the OHC is a soft-money research office of the university, and as such receives precious little state funding. Therefore, it is necessary that this educational initiative be a self-funding program. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide financial assistance to participants other than our limited number of scholarships. We encourage you to check in with your home institutions about financial assistance; in the past we have found that many programs have budgets to help underwrite some of the costs associated with attendance. We will provide receipts and certificates of completion as required for reimbursement.
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. We encourage you to apply early, as spots fill up quickly.
Questions
Please contact Shanna Farrell (sfarrell@library.berkeley.edu) with any questions.
About the Oral History Center
UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center, or the OHC, is one of the oldest oral history programs in the world. We produce carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed oral histories and interpretive materials for the widest possible use. Since 1953 we have been preserving voices of people from all walks of life, with varying perspectives, experiences, pursuits, and backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public.
Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Sign up for the Oral History Center’s Introductory Workshop (March 8)
The UC Berkeley Oral History Center is pleased to announce that applications are open for the 2024 Introductory Workshop!
The OHC is offering online versions of our educational programs again this year.
Introductory Workshop: Friday, March 8 from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30.p.m. Pacific Time, via Zoom
The 2024 Introduction to Oral History Workshop will be held virtually via Zoom on Friday, March 8, from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30.p.m. Pacific Time, with breaks woven in. Applications are now being accepted on a rolling basis. Please apply early, as spots fill up quickly.
Apply for the Introductory Workshop.
This workshop is designed for people who are interested in an introduction to the basic practice of oral history and in learning best practices. The workshop serves as a companion to our more in-depth Advanced Oral History Summer Institute held in August.
The workshop focuses on the foundational elements of oral history, including methodology and ethics, practice, and recording. It will be taught by our seasoned oral historians and include hands-on practice exercises. Everyone is welcome to attend the workshop. Prior attendees have included community-based historians, teachers, genealogists, public historians, and students in college or graduate school.
Tuition is $150. We are offering a limited number of participants a discounted tuition of $75 for students, independent scholars, or those experiencing financial hardship. If you would like to apply for discounted tuition, please indicate this on your application form and we will send you more information. Please note that the OHC is a soft-money research office of the university, and as such receives precious little state funding. Therefore, it is necessary that this educational initiative be a self-funding program. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide financial assistance to participants other than our limited number of scholarships. We encourage you to check in with your home institutions about financial assistance; in the past we have found that many programs have budgets to help underwrite some of the costs associated with attendance. We will provide receipts and certificates of completion as required for reimbursement.
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. We encourage you to apply early, as spots fill up quickly.
If you have specific questions, please contact Shanna Farrell (sfarrell@library.berkeley.edu)
About the Oral History Center
UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center, or the OHC, is one of the oldest oral history programs in the world. We produce carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed oral histories and interpretive materials for the widest possible use. Since 1953 we have been preserving voices of people from all walks of life, with varying perspectives, experiences, pursuits, and backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public.
Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
Out of the Archives: Patrick Hayashi: From Mail Carrier to Associate President to Artist
by Zachary Matsumoto
“My mom told me that an old deaf man, Mr. Wakasa, was walking his adopted stray dog around the perimeter of the camp,” recalled Patrick Hayashi. “His dog caught in the barbed wire fence and Mr. Wakasa went to save him and release him. The sentry ordered him to back away from the fence, but because he was deaf, he couldn’t do it, and so the sentry shot and killed him.”
This is the story of James Wakasa’s murder, which Patrick Hayashi’s mother told him when he was growing up. Wakasa was one of over 100,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government during World War II. In the incarceration camp of Topaz in the desert of central Utah, an armed US soldier shot and killed Wakasa. His death sparked outrage among Topaz’s incarcerees. Although individuals in the Japanese American community contest some of the details of Wakasa’s death, it remains a key, painful moment in the incarceration experience that Japanese Americans have passed down to their children.
The story of Wakasa’s death certainly remained an important memory for Hayashi, a Sansei—or third generation Japanese American—who was born in Topaz while his parents were unjustly imprisoned there. Hayashi discussed his life and career with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley. His interview was conducted as part of the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project, which explores trauma and healing across generations for Japanese Americans whose families were incarcerated during World War II.
As a young boy, after their release from the prison camp, Hayashi grew up with his parents in Hayward, California. His mother maintained ties to the Japanese American community, largely through church. However, when he was still young, Hayashi’s mother passed away of heart failure. This deeply saddened Hayashi’s father, who now carried the responsibility of raising a family as a single parent. Additionally, according to Hayashi, his father must have felt the guilt and shame from his incarceration experience in World War II. Nonetheless, Hayashi’s father exhibited resistance. He was a “no-no,” meaning he said “no” to two questions in an infamous loyalty questionnaire the US government forced upon the imprisoned Japanese Americans during WWII. The questions asked if one would be willing to serve in the US Army, and if one would swear loyalty to America and rescind loyalty to Japan. This sparked outrage among the Japanese American community, who were asked to serve a country that imprisoned them, and rescind a fealty to Japan that they didn’t have. Hayashi’s father’s “no, no” response was, as Hayashi believed, a “principled stand” against these unreasonable questions.
But his father never mentioned this resistance until Hayashi was an adult. Like many post war Japanese American families, Hayashi’s family did not often discuss their incarceration experiences.
Similar to his father, Hayashi also recalled feeling shame and guilt around incarceration and the war. In high school, he felt particularly ashamed of his identity when his class discussed WWII and the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At that time, Hayashi later recollected, “I was preferring not to be Japanese.” He also experienced a disconnect with the Japanese American community, largely due to his mother’s passing.Nevertheless, Hayashi shared many fond memories of his childhood, from reading Sherlock Holmes and science fiction books as an elementary schooler to becoming a star tennis athlete in high school.
If Hayashi felt shame due to his family incarceration, he channeled it into his work, starting in the 1960s. When reading his oral history, I noticed a theme of activism exhibited across his career in a near continuous fight for justice. After dropping out of college and working as a mail carrier, he found his calling in literature and became a UC Berkeley professor in the newfound Asian American Studies Department—one of the first such departments ever created. These developments for Hayashi came at the time of 1960s social movements in America. In one such movement, student protests in California universities led to the creation of an Ethnic Studies program at UC Berkeley.
Hayashi later became involved as a UC administrator, first working for Cal as the head of Student Conduct. After an investigation revealed that UC admissions were discriminating against Asian American applicants in the 1980s, Hayashi was appointed Associate Vice Chancellor of Admissions and Enrollment. In this position, and later as Associate President in the University of California, Hayashi worked on policy development and acted as an advocate for student applicants. He played a key role in fighting unfair admissions policies, such as the National Merit Scholarship Program (for discriminating against marginalized groups) and the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT (for not only explicitly favoring privileged students, but for also being, as Hayashi noted, a “bad test”).
One example of his advocacy came through at a meeting he attended soon after becoming Associate Vice Chancellor. In this meeting, Harold Doc Howe, Lyndon B. Johnson’s former Secretary of Education, communicated views with which Hayashi disagreed. Despite feeling nervous, Hayashi publicly challenged Howe in front of his colleagues. “My hands are actually trembling visibly in front of me and I said, ‘Howe begins with the assumption that a person’s writing ability reflects that person’s thinking ability. I don’t begin with that assumption. Instead I turn it into a question, and the question is to what extent does a person’s writing ability reflect that person’s ability to think?’ I said, ‘When you pose it as a question, the answer becomes obvious, it depends. If a person is new to the country or if the person is poor and has attended poor schools where the quality of education is low, then it’s incorrect and unfair to think that a person’s writing ability reflects that person’s thinking ability. Because oftentimes people just haven’t had the opportunity and the assistance to develop writing ability.’”
This, to me, demonstrates Hayashi’s sense of right and wrong – a fight against prejudiced assumptions in the admissions process.
Over time, too, Hayashi started to come to terms with the incarceration experience that his family hardly discussed and loomed over him like a cloud. One key moment for him occurred during his work as a UC professor. After reading James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, in which Baldwin discusses his experiences with racism and understanding the good his overbearing father did, Hayashi felt a better understanding both of his own father and his emotions. According to Hayashi, “[Baldwin] helped me understand my rage. And how if you’ve been suppressed constantly by racism, that goes somewhere and then it explodes. That was my pattern, and then it made me realize that it must have been my father’s experience as well. He was a proud man, he was smart, but it was clear, the injustice was clear to him and so it must have gone somewhere.”
To me, Hayashi’s understanding of Baldwin speaks to the emotional scars of incarceration that burdened many Japanese Americans. After experiencing racist injustice during World War II, anger would seem like a reasonable response. Perhaps the silence of many Japanese Americans after the war was the product of the internal, bubbling anger that people of color have felt throughout American history.
As Hayashi continued to come to terms with his family’s incarceration experience, James Wakasa’s story reemerged as an important moment. In the late 1980s, Hayashi visited an art exhibition from the incarceration camps, filling him with emotion. He recalled, “I choked up more and more and then the fourth painting I saw was Chiura Obata’s sumi-E sketch of James Wakasa falling over after he was shot, and I started to sob. It was terribly embarrassing, but everyone around me was mainly Nisei, they were crying too. That’s when I started revisiting the camps in a systematic way.”
Hayashi held true to his word. Later in life, he became more and more involved in the memorialization of Topaz, the camp of his family’s imprisonment. After retirement from Cal, Hayashi played a role in the creation and work of the Topaz Museum, located near the site of the former incarceration camp. He taught workshops at the museum for teachers in Utah, served as the keynote speaker at a 2016 Day of Remembrance event, and interviewed the Topaz class of ‘45—high schoolers who graduated in 1945 as Topaz incarcerees. Hayashi also took up painting as a major passion and a creative expression of his identity.
Hayashi’s life story is a reminder that one does not need to be defined by internalized pain of the past, but can instead come to terms with that pain and tell its story. The interviews and life stories told throughout the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project illuminate themes of memory, belonging, and healing. Hayashi’s life fully demonstrates each of these themes and serves as an inspiration for Japanese Americans pained by the past but who also want to make a difference.
To this day, he remains active in preserving the memory of incarceration. In 2016, Nancy Ukai, an activist who fought the auctioning of incarceration art, approached Hayashi with a request to create a painting for a Day of the Dead altar at a Japanese American cemetery. The request? To paint James Wakasa’s soul. His story, a source of intergenerational pain and important in Hayashi’s own life, now lay in the hands of Hayashi: a man who healed.
Patrick Hayashi’s oral history transcript is available on the OHC’s website.
Zachary Matsumoto is a sophomore at UC Berkeley currently studying History and participating as an Oral History Center URAP apprentice. He was drawn to the Oral History Center after attending a Bancroft Roundtable presentation about the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project. American history is a current academic interest of his, including the histories of communities relating to his background as a Chinese and Japanese American. In his free time, Zachary likes to go for runs, watch sports, and play taiko.
