As befits a church whose doors closed for three years when its Japanese American congregation was forcibly incarcerated during WWII, members of St. Peter’s Episcopal Parish in Seattle helped raise awareness that injustice is again in our midst.
On February 19, the Day of Remembrance – the 84th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, forcing approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans into imprisonment – church members protested with Tsuru for Solidarity and La Resistencia at the King County Airport. These organizations witness shackled, handcuffed detainees transported weekly by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement flights through the County-owned airport.
Local artists and community members displayed art pieces to call visual attention to the mass deportations.
At the Western Washington Fairgrounds in Puyallup on February 21, more than 250 attendees toured the Remembrance Gallery, heard personal accounts of incarceration experiences, created protest signs, and viewed a painter’s renditions of life in WWII detention. Many Seattle-area Japanese Americans spent several months in fairground horse stalls-turned-makeshift housing in 1942 while permanent detention centers were being constructed.
Later that day and just a few miles down the road at the Northwest Detention Center, protestors decried poor conditions endured by victims of mass detention at the facility (similar to those in the WWII incarceration camps), and called for the center’s shutdown.
More than 80 years since Japanese American incarceration (and St. Peter’s own wartime experiences), the civil rights abuses being perpetrated in our community today is a painful reminder of historical injustice repeating itself.
My prayers are with you as you witness to the love and jur Lord
Deacon Tony Irving