Historical Players

• Bronzeville: A short-lived African American enclave in downtown Los Angeles that replaced Little Tokyo during WWII after the U.S. government removed Japanese Americans from the West Coast into concentration camps (Densho).
• Japanese American Incarceration: After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, removing 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry as a “military necessity.” California defined anyone with 1/16th or more Japanese lineage should be incarcerated. Forty years later, the U.S. government later admitted their actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
• Jim Crow Laws: Comprised as a series of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation, these laws existed for nearly a hundred years (post-Civil War era to 1968). The legal system was stacked against African Americans, denying them the right to live safely and well. During this era of intense discrimination, African Americans could not access the same public facilities, hospitals, and instutions. Those who attempted to defy these laws were faced with arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence, and death. After World War II, there was an increase in civil rights activities, focusing on the right to vote. Within twenty years, the military, education, voting, and housing desegregated, resulting in the removal of the Jim Crow laws.
• House Resolution 40: The idea to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans Act was introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr. in the 1970s. In 2021, it was re-introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. HR40 recently passed, examining slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.
• Ronald Dellums (1935-2018): Born and raised in Northern California into a family of labor organizers, Ronald Dellums took his seat in Congress in 1971. He was the first African American elected to Congress from Nothern California and the first successfully open socialist after World War II. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1954 to 1956 before attending Oakland City College (now Merritt College), San Francisco State University and then University of California – Berkeley. During his second year of Congress, Dellums began a fourteen year long campaign to end the apartheid policies in South Africa. He was firmly against the Vietnam War and advocated strongly for Japanese reparations during the Redress Movement. In 2007 to 2011, he became the Mayor of Oakland.
• The Redress Movement: In the 1970s, a movement for redress was raised, in hopes of to prevent further incarceration based on race, religion, etc. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 when the U.S. government formally apologized for the events of WWII and authorized $20,000 to each former detainee who was still alive.