Sonoma County crowd remembers Japanese internment and plots action to defend rights

An event to commemorate the internment of 120,000 residents of Japanese ancestry by the ?U.S. government during World War II became a call to action Saturday, as a diverse panel of North Bay residents urged the defense of communities they said are now at risk of exclusion from American life.

More than 150 people in attendance appeared eager to take up the call, suggesting ways to organize and launch political action that some have already begun on their own.

David Hoffman, chairman of the Interfaith Council of Sonoma County, even asked for a show of hands to see “who in this room is seriously willing to consider breaking the law to protect an undocumented person or a Muslim?”

The workshop took place amid a swift, ongoing effort by the Trump administration to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and to bar entry to untold others from some predominantly Muslim countries. Several speakers said the campaign presented opportunities to stand up for the dignity of all humans and to resist the singling out of individual groups for persecution.

“This is the beginning of a movement,” said Novato civil rights attorney Charles Bonner, an African-American veteran of the civil rights movement in the South who said direct action in the streets and in the nation’s courts would be necessary again.

Bonner was among several panelists recruited for ?the event, titled “Protecting ?Human Rights: Solidarity in ?Diversity” and held at the Enmanji Buddhist Temple in Sebastopol.

It was hosted by the Oral History Committee of the Sonoma County Japanese American Citizens League as part of its annual Day of Remembrance, this year commemorating the 75th anniversary of the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, granting military officials authority to forcibly round up and detain residents of Japanese ancestry, about two-thirds of them American citizens.

Among the detainees were about 800 Sonoma County residents, including Marie Sugiyama, now 81, who was sent as a child to live with her family at the Camp Amache internment center in Granada, Colorado.

Remembering the barbed wire, guard towers and searchlights illuminating the desert by night, the Santa Rosa woman said those who lived alongside her “are firm in our resolve that it will never happen again.”

But she and others were frank in their assessment of rising xenophobia and bigotry in political discourse across the country, and the growing anxiety among Latinos and Muslims living here - fears to which several panelists gave voice.

Denia Candela, who emigrated from Mexico as a child and now works with families and children around the region, said fear and uncertainty are palpable in her community, with parents frantic about what would happen if they were detained and deported without their children.

Another speaker, Mubarack Muthalif, co-founder and community leader of the Islamic Center of North Marin, described a community increasingly concerned amid incidents of violence against American Muslims and rhetoric that seems to associate all followers of Islam with terrorism and hatred of Americans - beliefs in direct contradiction with tenets of the faith, he said.

Some have voiced fear of traveling out of town or even stepping foot outside of their homes, Muthalif said.

Choking up, he read part of a letter sent to his and many other mosques in six states that promised, in part, that Trump “is going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.”

Bonner and others present spoke of the need to organize letters, phone calls and even visits to government officials. More direct action could be called for, panelists said, including registering in solidarity with Muslims if those who follow Islam are forced to sign a registry; forming peace circles around buildings where would-be detainees are seeking sanctuary; or facing arrest during a demonstration.

“We all recognize that an attack on the humanity and the dignity of one person is an attack on all of us,” audience member Judy Rice said toward the close of the event.

Then she paraphrased a saying attributed to Michelangelo: “Most human efforts fail, not because we aimed too high and failed, but because we aimed too low and succeeded.”

“We are Americans,” Rice said. “We aim high.”