For more than 60 years, the students have not forgotten their teachers.
How could they? When their country locked them up in remote internment camps during World War II, these Japanese American students say one group of people in particular gave them hope: the teachers, most of them white, who volunteered to join them.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday March 09, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 34 words Type of Material: Correction
Internment camp teacher -- An article in the Feb. 5 California section about people who taught Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps identified Charles Ferguson, one of the teachers, as Ralph Ferguson.
When their world seemed upside down, the teachers tried to bring them the normalcy of school dances and football teams. In classrooms that initially lacked desks, textbooks and school supplies, the teachers somehow ignited the young minds and inspired students to pursue careers in science, medicine, education.
And when it came time to teach about U.S. democracy, teachers like feisty Margaret Crosby Gunderson told her students at the Tule Lake camp not to give up on the Constitution; that the nation's flawed political leadership was to blame for their unjust internment.
Now the teachers are frail, most of them in their 80s and 90s. They are quietly living in retirement homes and elsewhere. But their extraordinary actions touched and transformed a generation of Japanese Americans.
"We thought they needed help, so we helped," said La Verne resident Mary Smeltzer, 89, one of the former teachers.
Their little-known stories will take center stage tonight when the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo honors more than 200 of the camp educators. Among them, museum staff tracked down 53; more than half are expected to attend tonight's dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.
"They gave to us the link to the America we knew: the sense that not all Americans were racist, not all of them saw us as a threat but saw the potential we had as individuals," said Glenn Kumekawa, a retired Rhode Island professor who was sent to Topaz camp in Utah at age 14 after winning his San Francisco grammar school's American Citizenship Award.
"Inside the camp, when every public indication was that we had no future, you had these teachers saying, 'Yes, you do matter,' " he said.
Irene Hirano, the museum's president, said her staff had long heard stories about the teachers while gathering oral histories of former camp residents.
The museum received more than 200 nominations for educators who taught at more than 10 camps, where 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated following Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
