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| The main Manzanar Pilgrimage event in 2011 | Photo: Zach Behrens/KCET |
Last month I blogged about the 70th anniversary of the opening of Manzanar, a concentration camp in southern California. Grace Ito Coan, a member of Sacramento Friends Meeting, was among the U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry imprisoned there from 1942-1945. Her story in Western Friend put a personal face on disgraceful actions of the U.S. government.
This weekend, while I gathered with Quakers at Pacific Northwest Quarterly Meeting, I thought of the people participating in the 43rd Annual Pilgrimage to the site of the camp, designated twenty years ago as Manzanar National Historic Site. Zach Behrens, Editor-in-Chief, Blogs at KCET, wrote about his plans to attend: The Importance of Visiting Manzanar. A video from the 2011 pilgrimage ( Manzanar Pilgrimage) as well as Twitter posts from this year’s event (http://twitter.com/#!/manzanarcomm), gave me a sense of what happened there this weekend. And it reminded me again of the cruelty of fear. Remembering is an important step toward making sure such discrimination never happens again.
Iris Graville - Author 