'Integration, Not Segregation:' Japanese Americans in Chicago and Cleveland, 1942-1952.

A thesis by Chris Griffith, 2006. All quotes directly from the paper will be in italics.

However, very few academic studies have explored how interned Japanese Americans resettled and how their migration patterns from the camps shaped community developments of a distinct ethnic and urban nature in the Midwest.

I have read a pretty good bit about the Japanese American internment and I also have found very, very little that is in the lines of a follow-up study of what happened to the internees after they left the camps and moved elsewhere. There's some material on what happened to those who tried to return to the coast and the kind of violence some of them of them found, but not much on those who went elsewhere to live.

Instead, in this resettlement of the Midwest the Japanese Americans were met with direct and indirect assistance during the war from the War Relocation Authority, and later from community resettlement agencies, to begin rebuilding their lives.

So basically the Japanese Americans who resettled in the Midwest ended up getting a fair degree of help in starting their lives over. Such aid was missing from the West Coast. Ethnic clustering is the term the author uses for how the Japanese and the Japanese Americans lived on the West Coast originally, where they lived in enclaves of their own people. Such a choice has an advantage of having like-minded people around you but it also makes it easier to target the group if someone wants to do that.

Chicago and Cleveland shared the distinction of being among the largest cities in the Midwest at that time. They each had the economic, ethnic, and social service structures needed to support resettlement, of which the WRA took advantage when it chose Chicago as the main city for resettlement.

Thus, if you're a big city and you have groups willing to help people resettle than you chances of having a successful program of resettlement go up significantly. There were also chances for Japanese leadership in the process which proved to be another helpful point.

The paper goes briefly into the history of Japanese settlement on the West Coast. He provides an important statistic when he notes Japanese-run farms were worth $279.96 per acre, while white-run farms were worth only $37.94 per acre. This was due to the Japanese approach to farming which was more successful than the white approach. This, of course, caused a lot of hate on the part of the white farmers.

Another important statistic he gives, this in relation to ethnic clustering, is that over 1/3 of Japanese Americans living in California at the time lived in only six counties, and 1/3 lived in Los Angeles County alone. Again, this type of clustering makes them targets for discrimination. The internment camps and the process of relocation spread this community throughout the United States.

He also notes that the internment process itself ...significantly altered Japanese culture in the United States in terms of its traditions and its familiar practices.

Two events in the formative years of internment were significant to the efforts of resettlement outside the camps, the first of which was student resettlement. The second event was the establishment of relocation offices for permanent resettlement in major cities throughout the nation, except on the West Coast. The first of the seven “principal” relocation offices was opened in Chicago on January 4, 1943, and in the weeks and months that followed similar offices were set up in Cleveland, Little Rock, Salt Lake City, New York City, Kansas City, and Denver. These offices would direct thirty-five “subordinate” offices located within the vicinity of each principal office.

The decision had been made by the government that the Japanese and Japanese Americans were to be spread out. Thus, they set up various offices to get this understand. Students were allowed to go to colleges outside of the West Coast if the college would accept them and this also helped spread the Japanese around.

As of July 1, 1943, around 9,000 of the 120,000 interned had been resettled. Granted, this was less than 10% of them, but the resettlement process was beginning to work.

Before an adult left the camp they had to demonstrate they had a place to life and a job to go to, both of which were reasonable requests. This took a lot of work, of course.

The second chapter deals just with Chicago.

In 1942, a Japanese American nurse died in an automobile accident in Chicago. Because of racial discrimination, no cemetery would accept her body for burial, and it was kept in a funeral home for an entire week. Finally, the Japanese Mutual Aid Society intervened and purchased a small communal plot in the Montrose Cemetery so the body could be buried. Another cemetery threatened to exhume the body of an individual of Japanese descent who was buried there. The Montrose communal plot was small, since it was purchased at a time when the Japanese population in Chicago numbered only a few hundred.1 However, the Japanese population in Chicago would boom to more than 20,000 over the course of the war and resettlement, making burial sites for aging Issei and other Japanese Americans one of the many issues facing resettlers. Such issues were at the forefront of a Japanese American-led, urban Midwestern resettlement group, the Chicago Resettlers Committee (CRC).

There was, indeed, racial hatred present as is shown by these two examples. However, that can, at least sometimes, be overcome by hard work and good leadership. The city ended up with the biggest resettler population during and right after the war. Chicago newspapers paid attention to what was going on with Japanese Americans, both positive and negative stories.

There is something that had a major effect on discrimination and resettlement, though, and that was the issue of Blacks in Chicago. Remember, this was well before the Civil Rights movement and discrimination against Blacks was not confined to the South. So, when the Japanese Americans arrived, they were seen as nonwhite but not as bad as Blacks, thus serving as sort of a second-class citizen with the Blacks then being moved down to third class. Japanese Americans were those more 'acceptable' than Blacks. This led to less discrimination against them and made the process of resettlement in Chicago easier for them.

For employers, they would rather hire the Japanese Americans then the Blacks. This made getting jobs easier for the resettlers.

The first resettlers arrived in Chicago on June 12,1942. As of 1950, around 8% of all Japanese Americans in the United States lived in Chicago. Another advantage for the resettlers was how there was good cooperation between civic and religious groups and the WRA. This definitely helped smooth the resettling process.

Not everything went totally smoothly, though. Newspapers there still tended to use the term 'Jap.'

In July 1944, the Illinois Central Railroad was forced to lay off close to 60 Japanese American maintenance workers due to threats of a walkout from members of the American Federation of Labor. Apparently, this action was taken at the request of the army, which ordered a background check on all the resettled employees.

There was also an emphasis on getting the resettlers involved in various social activities, thus helping them to assimilate easier which was, after all, the basic goal of the idea of spreading them throughout the country.

A major event for persons of Japanese ancestry was in 1952 when the Walter-McCarrent Act got passed which allowed Issei to become American citizens.

The third chapter goes into resettlement in Cleveland.

Cleveland did not end up with as many resettlers as did Chicago and those who resettled there did not receive as much attention as those in Cleveland did. Around 3,100 did eventually resettle there and it became the third most popular city for resettlement with Denver being second with 3,124. Cleveland also had various agencies involved in working with the resettlers including the YMCA, the YWCA and local churches.

One of the most significant instances in which the Japanese American experience was documented in the Cleveland Press was a series of nationally-circulated editorials from Eleanor Roosevelt. In these particular editorials, she writes about her trip to the Gila River internment camp in Arizona, where she spent several days observing camp life. She prefaced the first editorial by acknowledging that many Americans have written her letters about the Japanese Americans being pampered by the government, seeing it as a form of guaranteed housing and welfare. Indeed, resettlement itself was feared as being seen as a type of welfare, but many community organizations emphasized the independent, successful nature of the Japanese Americans to counteract those criticisms. By writing in response to such harsh public opinion, she describes the industrious nature of the internees, saying that “there are several industries going on to aid the war effort.” She also goes on to add that “there is a great variety of backgrounds and a larger per cent of college graduates than is usual in a town of about 13,000 inhabitants.” What is interesting and ultimately not surprising about this description is that it came from Roosevelt herself, one of the most significant public relations figures in the country at that time.

(Note: this is the same woman that got attention for the Tuskugee Airmen and that helped lead to them being allowed to fly in the Italian war zone.)

As for jobs, the writer notes that in 1945 over 300 businesses in Cleveland employed Japanese American workers, although few of those businesses had anything to do with war production. After the war was over about half the resettlers chose to return to the West Coast where their homes had been for the majority of their lives.

The author notes that the success of the resettlement was due to Chicago and Cleveland being among the most prominent urban centers in the Midwest for economic and social mobility. The wartime economies of each teemed with businesses that could be filled by Japanese Americans.' The prejudices of the West Coast were not as major in the two cities. There were a variety of groups and organizations that worked to help make the process of resettlement run smooth and the people involved seemed to be dedicated and worked hard to achieve success.

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