Transcript
Into America
Uncounted Millions: The Cost of Healing
Trymaine Lee: When Adele Flateau’s grandfather and great uncle both died suddenly, it would forever alter the course of both sides of her family line, catapulting them onto paths that would eventually cross. In 1924, when the Flateau family’s fortunes were changed overnight, Adele’s father, Sidney, was just 8-years-old.
Adele Flateau: With just the father dying early, the mother can’t manage to take care of the four children. There wasn’t like enough resources to keep the whole family together. So that’s, you know, why they got split up.
Lee: Sidney was the eldest of four siblings. Two were sent to New Orleans, one was kept in Baton Rouge. And Sidney, he ended up more than 2,000 miles away in California. While this was a lonely journey for young Sidney, countless others were making the same fateful trip West. During the early part of the 20th century, about 2 million black southerners would move to cities, north and west, looking for better opportunities or to escape the racial violence of the Jim Crow south.
This was the first wave of the Great Migration and ultimately it would reshape the social, political and economic complexion of America.
And so Sidney Flateau would board a train, sent to live with an aunt and an uncle, who didn’t have kids, but who would raise him as their own.
Adele Flateau: He actually probably had a better life than he would have had if he stayed in — in Louisiana, in terms of being able to get education, which I guess his — his aunt and uncle must have paid for, and plus he was working too, you know.
Lee: Sidney made the most of this new start. He was a good student and in 1934 was admitted to UC Berkeley, but it wasn’t easy. While Sidney was hustling, he was also still trying to stay connected to the family he left back in Louisiana.
John Flateau: He also was a dining car waiter on the railroad that was going from New Orleans to California. That’s how he earned money, that’s how he got back and forth, stayed connected with his family in Louisiana.
Adele Flateau: He was always back and forth in Louisiana —
John Flateau: Yes.
Adele Flateau: — constantly because he always had that love for Louisiana. He never forgot his roots. He would try to go back as often as he could.
Lee: By the start of the 20th century, the newly established transcontinental railroad had innovated cross-country travel. And on that rail line was the Pullman Company, which became known not just for their lavish sleeper cars, but for the exceptional service provided by the sleeper car servants who were almost exclusively Black men, known as Pullman porters.
When George Pullman established the company in the waning days of the Civil War, he sought out formerly enslaved people, since he knew he could get away with paying them next to nothing and they’d be seemingly invisible to the white upper-class passengers. Despite the role’s racist origins, for the first half of the 1900s Pullman porters would play a major role in the creation and growth of the black middle class.
Adele Flateau: He tells us about his stories of being a porter on the railroad, you know, and cooking. He was trying — trying to, you know, instill in us the values of hard work and how much he had to go through just to get to where he was.
Lee: It would take Sidney seven years to finally earn his degree from Berkeley. He took two different leaves of absence: working, helping out family back in Louisiana, tending for sick relatives, then back to school again. Meanwhile, his dogged ambition drew his orbit even closer to that of the Coakleys.
May Hill: California sounded just grand and glorious.
Lee: This is May Edwards Hill, granddaughter of Gabriel Coakley.
Her sister is Lena Edwards, the doctor we heard from in episode two. May also gave a recorded interview with Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute.
Hill: The land was sunshine and fruit and flowers.
Lee: May Edwards Hill, her husband and four children moved their family to the Bay Area in 1933.
Hill: Most of the Black folk in California were from Texas and Louisiana and North and South Carolina.
Lee: But unlike a lot of Black families back then, they weren’t fleeing racial violence or financial calamity. They were following in their family’s tradition of service. May’s husband was a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And after working in D.C., Oregon and Colorado, he was tapped by leaders to head one of its esteemed churches, the oldest in Oakland.
And this wouldn’t be a family of Coakleys if they weren’t all about those degrees. After undergrad at Howard, May went back to school for her graduate degree at UC Berkeley.
Hill: I was the second colored ever to attend the school of social work there. And my daughter became a freshman on the campus. We were in school together.
Lee: One of May’s classmates was her very own daughter, Jeanne Marie Hill, the mother of John, Richard, and Adele.
Hill: She was a brilliant little rascal in high school. And she was sixteen when she entered the University of California, so we were on campus together. Sixteen-year-old Jeanne Hill and Mama Hill.
Lee: Mama Hill and Jeanne, together on the campus of UC Berkeley.
Richard Flateau: So, it would’ve overlapped there for probably about a year.
Lee: Wow.
Richard Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: That’s either a blessing or a curse.
Adele Flateau: Yeah, I — I think —
Lee: See, one of us —
Adele Flateau: I think —
Lee: — wonderful to see a mother —
Adele Flateau: I think my mother had mixed feelings about it, you know, like any kid would.
Lee: This was rare air they were sharing. In 1940, the year Jeanne would graduate, less than 5 percent of all American adults had earned a bachelor’s degree. That number was less than two percent for African American adults. Those numbers were even lower still for women. But it wasn’t all nose in the books for Jeanne. Still in her teens, she’d meet a smart, hardworking young man from down south who would sweep her off her feet. His name was Sidney Flateau.
What’s the story you all heard about how your parents met?
Adele Flateau: I heard it was a dance in Berkeley and I think it was early on.
Lee: While the future Mr. and Mrs. Flateau were busy hitting the books and going through the book of love, things were about to change in ways no one could’ve imagined.
Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt: since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
Don Tamaki: The targeting of black people and native people were constant. But when the outbreak of World War II, that cannon shifted to Japanese Americans who found themselves in the crosshairs.
Lee: The targeting of Japanese Americans during World War II would spark a new debate about what was taken and what was owed.
Pres. Ronald Reagan: My fellow Americans, we gather here today to right a grave wrong. More than 40 years–
Lee: Once again, America would prove that it’s capable of paying restitution. But how many wrongs was America ready to right, and who was deserving?
Tamaki: The conclusion seems to be that when it comes to black people, Congress is not even willing to study what happened, let alone do anything about it.
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee and this is “Into America.” On part four of “Uncounted Millions,” the Coakleys’ journey West would bring two families together at a moment when war would force the American government to reconsider its stance on reparations.
Act One: Under Attack.
Adele Flateau: Our mother, specifically the date of the bombing of Pearl Harbor was, like ingrained in her. And she kind of ingrained it in us because she — it occurred on the day that she was preparing a birthday cake for her mother. Her mother was born on December 7. And so when that occurred, obviously that left an imprint on her mind.
Newscaster: We have witnessed a severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy planes.
Lee: On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Empire attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, pushing the United States into World War II.
Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt: We will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but we’ll make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.
Lee: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the, quote, “forced removal of all persons deemed a threat to national security.”
The text of the order didn’t explicitly name Japanese people as a security threat, but that didn’t matter. With the president’s sign off, racism and nativism spiraled.
Newscaster: The army, of course, is glad to have the president’s order permitting the delineation of Jap-out areas on the West Coast next week.
Lee: Japanese Americans would be snatched away from cities like Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle and Portland, and confined to so-called relocation camps, further inland.
Milton Eisenhower: Authorities, therefore, determined that all of them, citizens and aliens alike would have to move.
Lee: The policy became known as Japanese internment, a euphemism for incarceration. Adele and Richard Flateau remember hearing stories.
Adele Flateau: Our mother specifically, she did tell us, you know, very vividly that people who had been like, classmates of hers, you know, disappeared like, you know, from the neighborhood.
Richard Flateau: Whole families, right?
Adele Flateau: Yeah, whole families just disappeared.
Lee: When Japanese incarceration began, their mom was 22 and just finishing up her studies while their dad was working towards a graduate degree at UC Berkeley. And throughout the UC system, a total of 700 students were removed from classes.
Adele Flateau: And most of them were Americans who had been here for a long time, you know. They had farms or homes and stuff. But that was something that I remember vividly.
Richard Flateau: It left a lifelong impact on her.
Lee: Among those students who were ripped away from campus was a schoolmate of Sidney’s, a pharmacy student at Berkeley named Minoru Tamaki.
Tamaki: He was scheduled to graduate, you know, he was taken away.
Lee: This is Minoru Tamaki’s son, Don Tamaki.
Tamaki: And Berkeley dutifully scrolled up his diploma and mailed it in a mailing tube addressed to Tanforan Racetrack, Barrack 80, Apartment 5, San Bruno, California. Barrack 80, Apartment 5 was actually a horse stall.
Lee: And for his family racism was part of the story from the beginning.
Tamaki: My grandparents emigrated to California in the late 1800s at the turn of the century. They arrived in really, what was the ultra racist period in the West Coast, in which Jim Crow had pretty thoroughly infected California and the original anti-black animus shifted slightly to include Asian Americans when they first landed in California.
Lee: A generation later, their American children would be herded and kept like cattle.
Tamaki: My mother was born in Oakland, California. My father was born in San Francisco. The defining experience in their lives was the outbreak of World War II beginning in December 7th, 1941 with the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan.
Lee: During incarceration, people were held in barren, military-style barracks with limited hot water. The camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences, armed guards and snipers.
After some time at an internment camp in California, Minoru was transferred to Utah, where he’d find bleak conditions but also something else.
Tamaki: My father was in his early 20s, as with my mother. They didn’t know each other actually and they had met when they were put at Topaz Concentration Camp in Utah.
Lee: So, they met for the first time at a concentration camp?
Tamaki: They did.
Lee: Wow. I mean talk about love in the midst of great struggle. That must have been a hell of a love story, I guess, under the circumstances?
Tamaki: I think so. For people not knowing what their fate was going to be, they didn’t know how long they were going to be in those camps, whether they would ever return to the West Coast. And so, you know, time was precious. And they met each other and ultimately married there.
Lee: There was no way to know what would happen, when the war would end, or whether they’d ever be able to return home. The United States Government would not release its Japanese American prisoners for more than four years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In total, more than 120,000 Japanese people were incarcerated during World War II, most of them American citizens.
In June 1946, President Truman signed an Executive Order allowing Japanese Americans to return to their homes. Many of them returned to find their property had been stolen, confiscated, or sold. The economic losses of Japanese Americans during internment was estimated to be $6 billion at the time, approximately $18 billion today. But, of course, the impact of Japanese incarceration was much more than just financial. The trauma and emotional impact would be felt across generations.
Tamaki: They didn’t talk about it. The lesson was be as white as you can, as fast as you can. Do not identify with being Asian American and don’t talk about what happened to them.
Lee: The generation of incarcerated Japanese Americans would stay silent about their experiences for decades. But eventually, time would come when they would decide to speak and demand their due. And in their fight, they’d find some allies along the way.
Rep. Ron Dellums: And this 6-year-old Black American child screamed back, don’t take my friend.
Lee: That story, when we come back.
Act Two: Standing in Solidarity.
Merze Tate: We were discussing your children’s friends in school —
Hill: Yes, yes in school, yes. Um —
Lee: May Hill– John, Adele, and Richard’s grandmother– told Harvard’s Oral History Project about the community where she raised her children on the West Coast.
Hill: My children had, I guess, as many Japanese friends as they had Black.
Tate: There were quite a group of Japanese there?
Hill: There were some.
Lee: Before World War II, early 20th century migration patterns and a strict racial caste system would often push African Americans and Japanese Americans together. Sometimes that meant existing side by side as neighbors or on assembly lines or across third base lines as rivals.
That’s not to say there wasn’t tension along those rungs of the social order, but both shared one thing in common, a fight to be seen as full citizens.
Tamaki: The one constant was targeting of Black people and the focus on Asian Americans and other disfavored groups sort of ebbed and flowed.
Lee: Don Tamaki, whose father spent time incarcerated during the war, was born in a hospital just a few minutes away from the AME Church in Oakland that brought Adele’s mom and grandparents to California. This proximity would sometimes determine how survivors of Japanese American incarceration would come out on the other side of internment. For Don, it helped his family hold onto a piece of property that had once belonged to his grandparents.
Tamaki: They were — ended up in Topaz Concentration Camp in Utah but their house was placed in the hands of — of one of their tenants, who was African American, who acted as a caretaker for that hotel during the duration of the war, collecting rents, making sure the mortgage was paid, and so on. And if it wasn’t for him, and I do not know his name, my family probably would not have held that hotel.
Lee: But many Japanese Americans were not so lucky. They returned to neighborhoods where much of what they’d built had been torn asunder. Homes, businesses, property. For many, their forced removal was met with plunder. And in the face of such trauma and losses, they simply buried their truth.
Emily Akpan: A lot of other Japanese American people have this experience where their families do not talk about it and then suddenly there’s some school project where your grandma or your relative who were incarcerated are asked to speak at your school. And so that is what happened for me.
Lee: Emily Akpan is a Black and Japanese activist. Her Japanese grandmother was once incarcerated at Minidoka camp in the Idaho desert. And when she returned home, she spent the following years keeping quiet.
Akpan: People just want to push it under the rug and not talk about it. And then there’s also these sayings that basically translate to grit your teeth or the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
Lee: Starting in the 1950s, there would be a shift in the fight for civil rights and inclusion. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act allowed Japanese immigrants to become naturalized citizens. And in the 60s, the civil rights and anti-war movements helped usher in a new era of dissent and a language around identity.
Akpan: A lot of the most radical Japanese Americans are folks that, honestly, learned a lot from organizing for Black liberation. And we see that when we look at the relationship between Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X but that was also happening across the U.S. as well.
Tamaki: We had grown up in an environment thinking that we were second class citizens. After all, you know, we grew up in the shadow of — of the — these incarceration camps. And I think we actually believed that. I hate to admit it. And it was this Black civil rights movement and then of the Black power movement in which leaders put a finger and named this ideology and value system that made people believe they were more than or less than one group or another. And so this effort of self-determination of your own community, spread from the Black community and into the other groups.
Lee: Don Tamaki was part of this new generation.
Tamaki: And so by 1969, 1970, the third generation of Japanese Americans, these are the children of those who had been in prison, began to question what the hell happened?
Lee: In 1978, the Japanese American Citizens League officially demanded an apology and monetary reparations for incarceration. And in the summer of 1980, a federal commission was authorized to gather testimony on the incarceration of Japanese Americans. Over 750 witnesses shared their stories, many for the very first time.
Martha Okamoto: I have never been able to talk about this but more people have come up to me and said I must speak up.
Ewan Yoshida: My father and two uncles were arrested and put in concentration camps. We were not told where they were sent. I have not seen my father since I was 11-years-old. I am now 51-years-old. I have missed my father very much and I wonder — I wonder if he’s alive today.
Amy Iwasaki Mass: The truth was that the government we trusted, the country we love, the nation to which we had pledged loyalty had betrayed us, had turned against us.
Lee: One of the witnesses who provided their testimony was Emily Akpan’s great-uncle, Yutaka Fujikado, who spent time at two camps during the war.
Akpan: It represented the first time that a lot of Japanese Americans felt empowered to share their story and to be recognized for what they experienced.
Lee: These efforts to bring attention to and seek justice for Japanese incarceration became known as the Redress Movement. A major part of these efforts was a sprawling legal strategy. Don Tamaki, shaped by his parents’ experience, attended law school at UC Berkeley, the same school as Adele’s parents and his own father before him. He later became part of the legal team that petitioned to overturn the conviction of Fred Korematsu, the Supreme Court case that justified incarceration.
Tamaki: Fred Korematsu was one of three litigants that defied the military orders for the roundup, believing themselves 100 percent American and loyal to this country, being born in this country.
They — they flatly refused to obey. They were arrested, they were tried and convicted.
Lee: In 1983, the federal court threw out Korematsu’s conviction, ruling that there was no legal basis for his incarceration.
Tom Brokaw, NBC: Court documents filed today indicate that government lawyers lied when they said that some Japanese Americans were spying for Tokyo.
That same year, after months of investigation and hundreds of witness testimonies, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians established that Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, but motivated by racial prejudice.
Newscaster: The commission called this a grave injustice based on no evidence of sabotage or espionage.
Lee: Their findings were bolstered by the compelling, deeply moving testimony of those impacted by incarceration. It helped garner public support for victims who had gone unacknowledged for four decades.
Newscaster: Today’s report begins a healing process for Japanese Americans, but survivors and heirs still must wait to see if the commission recommends new reparations.
Lee: And in January 1987, H.R. 442 was introduced in Congress, seeking an apology and restitution for those who were incarcerated. The bill was met with widespread support in the halls of Congress. Importantly, it was championed by one of the most influential groups on the Hill, members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including one of its founding members, Ron Dellums.
Rep. Ron Dellums: My home was in the middle of the block on Wood Street in West Oakland.
Lee: This is a speech that Dellums gave on the House floor, supporting H.R. 442
Rep. Ron Dellums: On the corner was a small grocery store owned by Japanese people. My best friend was Roland, a young Japanese child, same age. I will never forget, Mr. Chairman and members of this body, never forget because the moment is burned indelibly upon this child’s memory, six years of age. The day the six-by trucks came to pick up my friend. I would never forget the vision of fear in the eyes of Roland, my friend, and the pain of leaving home.
My mother, as bright as she was, try as she may could not explain to me why my friend was being taken away as he screamed not to go. And this six-year-old black American child screamed back, don’t take my friend. No one could help me understand that. No one, Mr. Chairman.
Lee: Dellums represented the California district that included Berkeley and Oakland. And like Adele’s mother, he remembered vividly the moments when his friends and neighbors were snatched away.
Rep. Ron Dellums: So it wasn’t just Japanese Americans who felt the emotion because they lived in the total context of community. And so I would say to my colleagues, this is not just compensation for being interned, how do you compensate Roland, six years of age, who felt the fear that he was leaving his home, his community, his friend, Ron, the Black American who later became a member of Congress. Roland, the Japanese American who later became a doctor, a great healer.
Lee: And Dellums, along with others, emphasized the demand for reparations.
Rep. Ron Dellums: This meager $20,000 is also compensation for the pain and the agony that he felt and that his family felt. It is about how much pain was inflicted upon thousands of American people who happen to be yellow. But this Black American cries out as loudly as my Asian-American brothers and sisters on this issue.
Rep. Barbara Lee: It was a remarkable speech. It could be used today in terms of addressing the damage every community that has been the victims and survivors of such atrocities in this country.
Lee: Recalling this impassioned plea is California Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who worked as Ron Dellums’ Chief of Staff in the 1980s.
Rep. Barbara Lee: He understood what internment meant in terms of the — the trauma, but also in terms of the economic setbacks. And the fact that Japanese Americans deserved justice from their country.
Tamaki: The fact that he stood up when he didn’t have to, I mean what would he have to gain by that? They could have said, look, why should we support reparations, when we haven’t gotten reparations? But I think, he and others realize that there was a bigger issue involved here.
Pres. Ronald Reagan: The legislation that I am about to sign provides for a restitution payment to each of the 60,000 survivors.
Lee: On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act.
Pres. Ronald Reagan: So, what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here, we admit a wrong, here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.
Lee: Seeing that reparations was once again possible in this country, would it be possible for Black Americans? That question remains when we come back.
Act Three: The Fight Reignites.
Mamoru Eto was 107-years-old and in a wheelchair when he received a $20,000 check from the U. S. Attorney General. On October 9, 1990, Mamoru Eto, along with eight of the other oldest living survivors of incarceration received the first checks for Japanese Americans paid by the Office of Redress Administration.
Over the course of the decade, the organization identified and sent checks to 82,250 Japanese detainees. When the office closed its doors in 1999, they had paid a total of $1.6 billion, a payout that would be worth about $3 billion today. Don Tamaki’s parents were among those recipients.
Do you recall or have any sense of what your parents did with, you know, what they were paid?
Tamaki: Oh, I think they paid some debts, and I — I recall them buying a car, a van for their grandchildren so they could take them around. Other people used the money to pay for education, mortgages, some donated the funds and so on. I know of many people that actually when it came down to the apology and the money, they kind of left the check on the table and they framed the apology. There are instances where people felt that they got their dignity back, and that meant more than anything.
Of course, if it was we’re — we’re sorry, but no money or we’re sorry and here’s a dollar, I don’t think the apology would’ve meant anything. But this was something where the government acknowledged a great wrong and actually put some money behind it.
Akpan: That is one thing that I got the sense of from her was that it’s great, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
Lee: Emily Akpan’s grandmother also received a check.
Akpan: The money could have never repaired all that was lost. The legacy of the Redress Movement also means to get rid of the systems that led to their incarceration to begin with.
Lee: In the same way that the civil rights movement inspired many second and third generation Japanese Americans to mobilize in the fight for redress, the Redress Movement itself would reignite the fight for reparations among Black Americans. The year after Reagan granted redress, Representative John Conyers of Michigan introduced an act with a simple goal, establish what he called the commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans.
Tamaki: The irony, however, is John Conyers proposes essentially the 1980 bill, not the money bill, but the study bill to study 246 years of enslavement, another 90 or more years of Jim Crow racial terror and exclusion and decade after decade of compounding consequences of discrimination.
Lee: The bill was shut down and never made it to a vote.
Tamaki: Very few co-sponsors, I mean literally a handful for — for years. And now it’s been almost 40 years and it’s never had a floor vote. So, the conclusion seems to be that when it comes to Black people, Congress is not even willing to study what happened, let alone do anything about it.
Lee: But Conyers is the very same man who fought for 15 long years to get a national holiday to recognize Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Undeterred and determined, Conyers doubled down.
Rep. John Conyers: A broad blanket of silence sweeps the country when you say reparation but, you can’t silence a good cause.
Lee: He reintroduced the bill the following year, the year after that, and every year for 30 straight years.
Rep. John Conyers: And so, we gather here one more time to break the silence that has kept this subject in chains.
Lee: It seemed that reparations for Black Americans just wasn’t going anywhere. And yet the Redress Movement showed that attitudes can shift and the seemingly impossible can become possible.
Tamaki: When Japanese Americans, mainly young people, were proposing reparations, how preposterous, how impossible, how fringy did that sound? Reparations is in mainstream conversation, has never before in my lifetime, and I’m an old dude.
Lee: Slowly but surely, the conversation did begin to shift.
Chris Hayes: In an epic and masterful and highly controversial essay that everyone is talking about, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, an America that asks what it owes–
Lee: In 2014, “The Atlantic” published The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The groundbreaking piece is credited with shining a light on the very real need for reparations in the United States and bringing the idea back into the mainstream conversation.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: This is not just a matter of poverty, you know, racism is an actual real thing with actual consequence. And the wealth gap is the biggest illustration of that.
Lee: And this momentum was heightened in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd.
Protestor: –Say matter. Black Lives.
Crowd: Matter!
Protestor: Black Lives.
Crowd: Matter!
Protestor: When I say Black Lives, you all say matter. Black Lives.
Rep. Barbara Lee: When Mr. George Floyd was killed on television, many white people, progressives from my district called me and couldn’t understand how in the world could a Black man be killed like this.
Lee: Just weeks after Floyd’s murder, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, now representing the same district as her former boss, Ron Dellums, introduced legislation to establish the first federal commission on racial healing.
Rep. Barbara Lee: Many people could not understand why African Americans were disproportionately impacted and dying of COVID. And I had to explain to them how through the generations that there had been policies in the United States that create these huge gaps and disparities that end up with African Americans dying younger, our unemployment statistics are always greater, housing discrimination exists, just how these economic disparities have a direct link to the 250 years plus of enslavement. We’ve introduced — then it was H.R. 19 calling for the establishment of the Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Commission.
Lee: Since then, the bill to establish this commission has been endorsed by over 240 organizations and individuals.
Rep. Barbara Lee: Why that’s important in the United States is that we have never had this moment, where the descendants, those who were enslaved during the Middle Passage, come forward and talk about the impacts, the trauma and the economic impacts, the social disparities, how they exist today and manifested in today’s policies and programs and funding priorities. It’s about a government sanctioned system of slavery that has to be dealt with.
Lee: Later that year, California established its own task force to develop reparations proposals for African Americans.
Newscaster: Now, a law in California is trying to right some historical wrongs establishing a path to reparations for Black residents and descendants of slaves the first state to adopts a law like this–
Lee: And there’s only one non-Black member of that task force.
Tamaki: I was one of the Governor Gavin Newsom’s appointees, and four would be appointed by the legislature and by June of 2021.
Lee: Given his experience working for Japanese American reparations, Tamaki’s selection on the task force was a no brainer, but it also taught him something.
Tamaki: I used to view the rounding up of Japanese Americans, including my family, as sort of an example I would say of anti-Asian hate. But after serving on this task force, I now realize that it was merely a subchapter in a racial pathology that began long before Japanese Americans ever arrived on these shores.
Lee: Two years later, the task force released its final report to the California legislature, coming in at a whopping 1,100 pages and listing 115 recommendations for how the state should compensate its Black residents for their harm, harm which is calculated at a million dollars per person.
Tamaki: We did hire four economists to crunch numbers on the economic cost of housing discrimination and devaluation of Black businesses and healthcare, particularly in longevity. And they came up with a number and that number is enormous. It is ginormous, and that was done because we felt the public should know of the economic impact, of years and years and years of exclusion.
Lee: And momentum in California is building. Tamaki might not be Black, but he’s brought an entire community of Japanese Americans offering their support for African American reparations.
Tamaki: Dozens and dozens of these organizations have now gotten behind this movement. Part of it has to do with reciprocity. And that is to say, Black leaders stood in solidarity at a time that Japanese Americans needed them, but also, it’s a sense of justice. This is — it goes to the heart of what it means to be an American. And it’s not just simply an issue of compensation and righting wrongs, but it’s finding your place in belonging in America.
Akpan: Something that I think is really beautiful is that I’ve heard Japanese American elders who are in their 90s just deeply believing that it’s the right thing to do. And that’s kind of their driving force.
Lee: Emily Akpan has worked to establish the National Nikkei Reparations Coalition, a coalition of Japanese American organizations, all working towards supporting Black reparations.
Akpan: It’s impossible to fight to dismantle systems without being in solidarity because we’re all impacted. It has to be a collective movement.
Rep. Barbara Lee: The Redress Movement was based upon the civil rights movement and the Black power movement. And now, the Redress Movement and those who were participating at that point are very supportive of the Reparations Movement, so it’s come full circle which I think is an important fact–
Adele Flateau: Seeing that responsibility, if you will, of helping others, you know, to achieve reparations, it’s the right thing to do but it takes a lot of courage.
Lee: Before these pivotal movements took root, Adele’s parents, Sidney and Jeanne Flateau, would leave Oakland and start growing their family and laying roots in a brand new city.
Adele Flateau: And then when he met my mom and they got married, they moved to the East Coast because, you know, they had a support system here, you know.
Lee: Sidney and Jeanne Flateau would head back east, not to D.C., the Coakley family homestead, but to New York.
But their New York was one in flux. There was social and economic segregation and urban renewal by the likes of Robert Moses who was bulldozing and splitting entire Black communities. But like generations before, the Coakley-Flateaus would challenge the system and strive and fight for theirs, for all of ours. And that place would become central in the fight for Black reparations today.
Protestor: Reparations!
Crowd: Now!
Protestor: Reparations!
Crowd: Now!
Protestor: Reparations!
Crowd: Now!
Sen. Zellnor Myrie: There’s a misconception that New York was hands off in the enslavement of people of African descent.
Protestor: Sign the bill!
Crowd: Sign the bill!
Protestor: Sign the bill!
Crowd: Sign the bill! Sign the bill! Sign the bill! Sign the bill!
John Flateau: We’re waiting on the governor to sign that bill. It did pass the legislature’s. It’s a reparations commission for the state of New York.
Lee: That’s next time on “Uncounted Millions.”
If you love the show and are excited about this series, help spread the word. You can do that by rating and reviewing “Into America” on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening right now. This episode of “Into America” was produced by Max Jacobs and Janmaris Perez. Catherine Anderson and Bob Mallory are the sound engineers. Bryson Barnes is the Head of Audio Production. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Aisha Turner is the Executive Producer of MSNBC Audio.
Thanks to the Schlesinger Library on “The History of Women in America” and Harvard University for the use of “The May Edwards Hill Interview.” Thanks to Maggie Jacobs at UC Berkeley for additional research help. I’m Trymaine Lee. See you next Thursday for more of “Uncounted Millions.”