WWII Internment Camp Veteran to Speak at MCC

The Middlesex Community College One World Series will host Glenn Kumekawa, a leading public-planning expert and veteran of a World War II relocation camp for Japanese-Americans, at 10:30 a.m., Thursday, Oct. 11, in the Bedford Campus Center Café East, 591 Springs Road.

Free and open to the public, the program is offered in conjunction with MCC's 2007-08 Common Book, Julie Otsuka’s When The Emperor Was Divine. Otsuka's acclaimed first novel is the fictionalized account of how one West Coast Japanese-American family is affected by the events of World War II.

Glenn Kumekawa was 14 years old when he and his family were given two weeks to leave their San Francisco home. Their detention began in the months after the U.S. entered the war, following President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1942 executive order allowing the forcible concentration of Japanese-Americans. For three years, the Kumekawas lived behind barbed wire, under armed guard at Camp Topaz in the Utah desert. (This is the camp fictionalized in Otsuka's novel.)

Profoundly affected by the internment experience, Kumekawa was also influenced by the efforts of Americans of conscience who worked to free Japanese-Americans from the camps. At Middlesex, he will talk about his personal experiences and the parallels he sees between racial attitudes in the U.S. following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and current attitudes following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Now a leading public-planning expert, Kumekawa is professor emeritus at the University of Rhode Island where he was director of the Intergovernmental Policy Analysis program. He is also president of the Nisei Student Relocation Commemorative Fund, a scholarship program for U.S. students from Southeast Asian immigrant families.

MCC's Common Book is selected for literary quality and relevance to many subject areas by the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Committee. The One World Series at Middlesex is an annual speaker series addressing topics of current interest. This event is made possible by MCC's Student Union Government Association, Student Activities Office, WAC and the Humanities Division.

For more information, contact Tom Laughlin, chair of MCC's Writing Across the Curriculum Committee, at 781-280-3839.