Around 400 people gathered in L.A.'s historic Little Tokyo district Friday evening (28th), for a candlelight vigil against hate crimes.

To commemorate the unconstitutional internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War 2, members of the Japanese American community held a candlelight vigil to warn against hate crimes committed against the Arab American community and their possible internment in the event of a full scale war. In this photograph, Labor Union Activist and Artist, David Monkawa, holds a candle symbolizing peace. Around 400 people showed up for the gathering... 70 % of which were Japanese Americans, many of which were actual veterans of the internment camps. The event was held on the very spot were Japanese Americans were rounded up by the U.S. Government and shipped off to remote, barbed-wire surrounded camps like the infamous

Manzanar internment camp.

Four mainstream organizations of the Japanese American community helped to organize the event... the Japanese American Citizens League, the Japanese American National Museum, the Japanese American Cultural and Community

Center, the Little Tokyo Service Center, and the Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress (NCRR). You can contact the NCRR at (213) 680-3484)... or you can visit their Website at the following URL; http://www.ncrr-la.org/

During the vigil, representatives from the Muslim community publicly thanked the JA community for "going through" the camp experience. They were thankful that they would not be herded up en-masse and sent to camps in the desert. (Knock wood. It ain't over yet.)

What they meant, of course, was that they were thankful that the JA community successfully got redress and reparations for the injustices they suffered. The R&R campaign kept the issue in front of the media, politicians, and the courts. The message was framed as an issue of national civil rights, as a blemish on American history, and people grew to accept this as fact. As the years went on, support for reparations grew, and in 1988, a law was signed to give the victims still living a token ,000 check.

After people got their payments, many were donated to help pay for the Japanese American National Museum, where this vigil was held. The museum has worked to preserve the history of the JA camp experience, making it real not only for visitors, but helping researchers and writers get information about the camps.

It's not unusual to round up minorities during war, as some recent civil wars have shown. What's unusual is, over time, with great effort, a people can learn not to commit ethnic genocide. What's unusual is, when, despite a widespread call to war, we don't make enemies of neighbors who resemble the "enemy".

That we have made this small step toward "human rights" should be recognized as a victory for humanity, and inspiration to continue the struggle.

[The link is to information about the Korematsu case, which helped establish the unconstitutionality of the internment camps.]