NEVER AGAIN IS NOW

Published in the August 30, 2025 issue.

The Trump Administration’s attempts to whitewash some aspects of American history are a personal affront to families who endured one of the many ugly chapters in the nation’s past. And it is critical to speak out, challenge and fight back against efforts to erase parts of the past that don’t fit the glorified view of America. That sanitized view does not include when America’s leaders and people fell far short of its ideals. Many of those glaring scars include gross violations of basic civil rights.  

That message was delivered with passion and a touch of anger by speakers in front of the barbed wire fence and the white, iconic “Soul Consoling Tower” in the cemetery at the Manzanar National Historic Site on Saturday. The speakers and an audience of 80 were there to condemn attempts by the Trump administration to rewrite the nation’s history. Their concern and passion reinforced the sense that history has a long arc and past attempts to bend history to fit an ideology have turned out to be a fool’s errand. 

But it does take a willingness to fight to preserve a factual and unvarnished view of the past. Those ready to engage in that battle showed up at Manzanar. 

The “false narrative and lies” about “threats to national security” that led the US Government to using U.S. Army troops to tear 120,000 Japanese Americans away from their homes, businesses and communities are being used today, said Bruce Embrey president of the Manzanar Committee. For more than five decades, “No More Manzanars, Never Again” has been the rallying cry of the non-profit Manzanar Committee, whose mission stresses learning from history and not repeating the mistakes of the past. 

That mission has taken on a sense of urgency. “Never Again is Now,” Embrey and other speakers emphasized. 

Masked ICE “troops” swarm and terrorize communities and forcibly detain immigrants and families, including children, without due process because of their skin color or the language they speak, Embrey noted. Then “detainees” are held in “inhuman prison camps.” 

“How is this different than 1942?” he asked, when his mother Sue Embrey, a co-founder of the Manzanar Committee, was forced to leave her home and was incarcerated at Manzanar. 

In fact, the Trump Administration is “using the same law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798” to target immigrants, said Embrey. That law was cited in President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which approved the forced removal and “internment” of West Coast Japanese after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Similarly, Trump’s string of Executive Orders are the basis for his attempts to “revise” and in some cases hide aspects of the nation’s history. 

“They want to erase our community, our story, because it negates their story,” Embrey said. “But we will not allow our history to be disappeared or erased.” 

“People and Places Will Not Be Erased” declared the poster next to the speakers. The poster featured a photo of a young Japanese American woman, Fumiko Hayashida, carrying her baby, Natalie, during their forced removal from their home in Bainbridge Island, Washington, in 1942. They ended up, like about 120,000 other Americans of Japanese descent, incarcerated in 10  “camps” spread across the nation for the duration of WW II.

Another photo of a mother and young children was held up by one of the speakers, Pat Sakamoto. The photo was on the cover of the 2015 Manzanar Pilgrimage Program. Pat Sakamoto is in the photo being carried by her mother, Kazuko “Koo” Sakamoto, dressed in a tailored dress suit and hat, and an older sister Janice. They were leaving Manzanar in November of 1945 after being incarcerated there with about 10,000 others. Pat’s mother was seven months pregnant when she was forced to leave her home in Boyle Heights, and take buses and trains to Manzanar, where she gave birth to Pat. The sidewalks and foundation of the Manzanar Hospital where she was born remain. 

They cannot be erased. 

Sakamoto’s mom, like many of her generation, would not talk much about her time at camp and the indignities endured. “It was too hurtful … there’s nothing to talk about,” Pat quoted her mother as saying. 

But that part of both of their lives was unavoidable. And the next generation took it on themselves to share their parents’ stories about camp life and its impacts. “I promised to be my mom’s voice” in the debate over how to present and preserve the internment camp era, Pat said. “And now I’m afraid they are going to try and erase all of that.” 

The photo of Pat and her mother, and Pat’s ongoing witness, along with oral histories by hundreds of camp survivors cannot be erased.

One irony of the camp era is that the federal government (though the War Relocation Authority) had photographers (including the legendary Dorothea Lange) document the camp era, from the forced removals to camp life. Los Angeles photographer and Manzanar internee Toyo Miyatake photographed camp life and Lone Pine professional photographer Alan Ramsey photographed weddings, funerals and camp events. 

Ansel Adams was so enraged at the incarceration, he went to Manzanar in 1943 and took hundreds of photos of the incarcerees and published them in a book, “Born Free and Equal.” 

Adams donated his Manzanar photos to the Library of Congress and allowed them to be used without charge. Also given an “unrestricted use” designation are about 17,000 photos of the camp era in the National Archives. Thousands of those photos are now on display in museums across the country. 

The photos cannot be erased. 

The US government also created a “written record” of the injustice of the incarceration action. Congress approved and President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Rights Act of 1988. The legislation presented a formal apology to the 120,000 Japanese Americans, more than two-thirds American citizens, who spent the war in camps behind barbed wire. It noted there were no acts of espionage or sabotage by the Japanese, even though that “threat” had been used to justify the incarceration. 

The act stated internment was driven by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” 

That reckoning with history changed the narrative around the camps. It also led to the creation of the Manzanar National Historic Site, between Independence and Lone Pine, and eventually seven other camp sites. 

That Civil Rights Act cannot be erased. 

The event at Manzanar was one of five in the country, titled “A Day of Action to Defend Parks and History.” The event was hosted by the Manzanar Committee, Friends of the Inyo, Inyo 350 and the non-profit National Parks Conservation Association. 

Recent Trump administration “directives” demanding federal museums, historic sites and libraries basically lock away or hide “divisive” material and exhibits are the most recent attack on the nation’s shared history. Also, visitors to national parks and historic sites are being asked to “report” whatever they perceive to be “negative about past or living Americans.” The notice of that directive is taped on the front door of the Manzanar Visitor Center.

The first hints of “whitewashing” came into focus earlier this year when the Pentagon deleted from its website the history of the Navajo Code Talkers, the all-black Tuskegee Airmen and the all-Japanese American WW II units, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion. The racist pattern was clear, Embrey pointed out. 

The highly decorated 442nd and 100th included men, volunteers and draftees, from internment camps. The Manzanar Visitor Center has an exhibit on their history. It features a film of President Harry S. Truman hosting the 442nd at the White House in 1946, and stating, “I congratulate you … You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice — and you have won.”

The full transcript of Truman’s remarks is at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, MO. 

The president’s words and actions cannot be erased. 

“We’ve always fought to be here,” said Noah Williams of the Bishop Paiute Shoshone Tribe. In 1863 the US Army tried a “forced removal” by trying to march nearly 1,000 Owens Valley Paiutes to Ft. Tejon. Many escaped during the march, and those who didn’t die came back to the valley. The Paiutes became a crucial agricultural workforce in the valley, including at the orchard community of Manzanar. The Paiute story is included in the exhibits at Manzanar. 

Jerimiah Joseph, of the Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Tribe, offered a land acknowledgement, but it was short. He decided to leave out “the warm and fuzzy” comments. In the battle for land and justice, “the warrior spirit is more applicable.” 

The Paiutes cannot be erased. 

Fran Hunt, from Inyo 350, recalled the famous Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quote, initially articulated by 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parkler, that the “the arc of moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Hunt added that arc “does not turn by itself, people have to push it.” 

There is a lesson to be learned about long-term engagement from the decades of political, moral and cultural battles fought over the Civil Rights Act of 1988 and creation of the Manzanar National Historic Site, said Embrey.

“When we stand up and fight, we win.”