Winehole23
12-29-2014, 04:43 PM
didn't know about this camp until very recently:
On October 22, 1969, fifty students at the University of Texas at Austin climbed into the stately live oaks and cypresses that offered shade on the campus along Waller Creek and then refused to budge. Frank Erwin, the all-powerful chairman of the board of regents, had ordered the trees taken down to make way for an expansion of UT’s football stadium, and a fierce opposition had arisen. In an op-ed published in the Daily Texan, Alan Taniguchi, the dean of the School of Architecture, condemned Erwin’s decision to remove the trees. “Professionally observed, the environmental quality of our campus is bleak,” he wrote. “Buildings have taken precedence over open spaces, things have taken precedence over people.”
On the morning of the protest Taniguchi arrived to show moral support for the students. Erwin called in campus, city, and state law enforcement officers, who pulled the crusading students from the trees and arrested 27 of them. Soon after, Erwin’s bulldozers knocked down the mammoth trees, and the stadium got 15,000 new seats. To this day, people at UT still speak of “the Battle of Waller Creek.”
The Alan Taniguchi I met at a faculty senate meeting two years later was something of a celebrity. He had an imposing demeanor and was still a stalwart opponent of Erwin’s. To the ire of the steadfastly conservative chairman, Taniguchi spoke out regularly on campus and elsewhere against the Vietnam War. On one occasion he asked two FBI agents to leave the architecture building when he saw them photographing anti-war protesters from a window in the men’s restroom. When Erwin found out, he cut funding to the school of architecture to punish Taniguchi.
I was attending the faculty senate meeting as a reporter for the Daily Texan. I was twenty years old, from a small town in the Piney Woods of East Texas, and had never before met an Asian person. After the meeting, I approached Taniguchi for a brief interview and asked him about his ancestry. He explained that he was Japanese but born in America.
“How did you get to Texas?” I asked.
“My family was in camp here,” he said.
“Church camp?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he said with a laugh.
Taniguchi told me that his father, Isamu, had been interned as a “dangerous enemy alien” in Crystal City during World War II. He explained that his family had been among the tens of thousands of Japanese arrested and incarcerated during the war, nearly two thirds of them American-born. As he spoke, his demeanor was calm, without a trace of self-absorption, but he said that the humiliations visited upon his family and thousands of others had left him skeptical about of government power, especially during wartime. He was a man of courage, which showed in the straightness of his posture and his willingness to take on Erwin.
A year after our meeting, Taniguchi left UT to head the architecture school at Rice University. In the decades that followed, we saw each other occasionally, and the subject of our conversations inevitably returned to the Crystal City Internment Camp. Unlike many of the other camps throughout the country that have been written about extensively, the Crystal City camp is largely unknown. It opened in 1942 for the purpose of allowing German, Italian, and Japanese fathers who’d been identified as dangerous enemy aliens to be reunited with their wives and children. The Roosevelt administration cloaked the camp in secrecy because hundreds of Crystal City prisoners were being exchanged for American diplomats, soldiers, and missionaries who were being held behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany. Over the decades, that veil of secrecy has never really lifted.
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/south-texas-internment-camp-world-war-ii
On October 22, 1969, fifty students at the University of Texas at Austin climbed into the stately live oaks and cypresses that offered shade on the campus along Waller Creek and then refused to budge. Frank Erwin, the all-powerful chairman of the board of regents, had ordered the trees taken down to make way for an expansion of UT’s football stadium, and a fierce opposition had arisen. In an op-ed published in the Daily Texan, Alan Taniguchi, the dean of the School of Architecture, condemned Erwin’s decision to remove the trees. “Professionally observed, the environmental quality of our campus is bleak,” he wrote. “Buildings have taken precedence over open spaces, things have taken precedence over people.”
On the morning of the protest Taniguchi arrived to show moral support for the students. Erwin called in campus, city, and state law enforcement officers, who pulled the crusading students from the trees and arrested 27 of them. Soon after, Erwin’s bulldozers knocked down the mammoth trees, and the stadium got 15,000 new seats. To this day, people at UT still speak of “the Battle of Waller Creek.”
The Alan Taniguchi I met at a faculty senate meeting two years later was something of a celebrity. He had an imposing demeanor and was still a stalwart opponent of Erwin’s. To the ire of the steadfastly conservative chairman, Taniguchi spoke out regularly on campus and elsewhere against the Vietnam War. On one occasion he asked two FBI agents to leave the architecture building when he saw them photographing anti-war protesters from a window in the men’s restroom. When Erwin found out, he cut funding to the school of architecture to punish Taniguchi.
I was attending the faculty senate meeting as a reporter for the Daily Texan. I was twenty years old, from a small town in the Piney Woods of East Texas, and had never before met an Asian person. After the meeting, I approached Taniguchi for a brief interview and asked him about his ancestry. He explained that he was Japanese but born in America.
“How did you get to Texas?” I asked.
“My family was in camp here,” he said.
“Church camp?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he said with a laugh.
Taniguchi told me that his father, Isamu, had been interned as a “dangerous enemy alien” in Crystal City during World War II. He explained that his family had been among the tens of thousands of Japanese arrested and incarcerated during the war, nearly two thirds of them American-born. As he spoke, his demeanor was calm, without a trace of self-absorption, but he said that the humiliations visited upon his family and thousands of others had left him skeptical about of government power, especially during wartime. He was a man of courage, which showed in the straightness of his posture and his willingness to take on Erwin.
A year after our meeting, Taniguchi left UT to head the architecture school at Rice University. In the decades that followed, we saw each other occasionally, and the subject of our conversations inevitably returned to the Crystal City Internment Camp. Unlike many of the other camps throughout the country that have been written about extensively, the Crystal City camp is largely unknown. It opened in 1942 for the purpose of allowing German, Italian, and Japanese fathers who’d been identified as dangerous enemy aliens to be reunited with their wives and children. The Roosevelt administration cloaked the camp in secrecy because hundreds of Crystal City prisoners were being exchanged for American diplomats, soldiers, and missionaries who were being held behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany. Over the decades, that veil of secrecy has never really lifted.
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/south-texas-internment-camp-world-war-ii