Just Like Jim Crow
And Then They Took Over the Media
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About a month before FDR signed the 1942 order that allowed Japanese-Americans to be corralled, Walter Lippmann alerted America to the danger they posed. The fact that since war had broken out there’d “been no important sabotage on the Pacific Coast” was all the proof the great pundit needed: “This is not, as some have liked to think, a sign that there is nothing to be feared. It is a sign that the blow is well-organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.”
“The only way that we can help the Jews, and I believe that we should help the American Jews first, is to keep the numbers small so that feeling will not be aroused against them. The minute that they show up in numbers they become a threat to the others as they reveal that they could occupy all the jobs there are and that they are quite likely to work together in filling the jobs.
A Passing Mention
“It was so hurtful,” Sandra Fontanez-Phelan had told me, “and I’m really mirroring the hurt of my staff, the hurt of my kids, the hurt of my family.” She was preparing a packet of letters from teachers and students to send the Tribune, and she’d talked to her alderman, Ray Suarez, about holding a news conference to set the record straight. Fontanez-Phelan, who’s finishing her fourth year at Kelvyn Park, told me that after reading Dell’Angela’s story people from the West Logan Square community called to ask if she’s been lying to them when she says how far the school has come. “It’s irresponsible to put out information and not clearly indicate that it’s information from the past,” she told me. “It’s irresponsible not to say what’s going on today.”
Maybe the French Kids Are on to Something
