AAC Director Dr. Heidi Kim’s interview on August 10, 2022: Watch on YouTube!
Details: We are honored to have Dr. Heidi Kim join us for a discussion about her article published in the April 2019 North Carolina Historical Review, “From Camp to Chapel Hill: UNC’s Fight to Admit Japanese American Students during World War II” and explain the social implications of the Japanese American incarceration and the complex racial landscape of the midcentury South.
After Pearl Harbor, 110,000 Japanese Americans were uprooted from the West Coast and put in camps in the interior of the country. Among them were Kei Kaneda (left, courtesy of Sibylle Barlow) and Shizuko Hayashi (right, courtesy of Carol Sakai Hodgson), who were released from incarceration at relocation camps shortly before attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. UNC president Frank Porter Graham (middle, courtesy of North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) had opposed Japanese American incarceration from the beginning and supported placing two Japanese American students at the Chapel Hill campus.