“The student had no way of knowing whether the stranger, who had come to take him away, really meant to help. Nevertheless he let himself be driven at breakneck speed through the blackout to Klamath Falls in Oregon where he would catch his train for St. Louis, Missouri.”
Because of a delay earlier at the camp, it was long past the departure time when the two reached the station. Fortunately the train was also late. If the lad could reach St. Louis the next day he would be successfully enrolled in the medical school program for future doctors at George Washington University. Thomas Bodine, the driver of the car and a future Clerk of New England Yearly Meeting, never forgot the eeriness of that night. It gave him much joy that he had helped the first Japanese American student to actually leave an internment camp and get the chance to finish his college education.
In early March of 1942 Clarence Pickett, Executive Director of the American Friends Service Committee, became involved with what the American Civil Liberties Union would call, “the single most wholesale violation of the civil rights of American Citizens in our history.” This statement referred to the evacuation by Presidential Executive Order of more than one hundred thousand Japanese residents and Japanese American citizens from their west coast homes to inland “relocation camps” regarded as concentration camps by those rounded up. The Japanese Americans were suspected of being high loyalty risks during our war with Japan.
Shortly after this catastrophe was accomplished, Milton Eisenhower (youngest brother of General Dwight Eisenhower) called Clarence Pickett and asked whether the Service Committee would undertake to organize the transfer of Japanese students, who had been attending West Coast Universities prior to the evacuation, to inland colleges so they could finish their formal education. Eisenhower felt that this job ought to be done by an agency that had complete freedom from government connections, hence he was asking the AFSC to undertake this project.
Clarence Pickett was immediately positive about the suggestion. He lost no time in seeking funds from Foundations for the relocation program. He said that the more one sees the possibilities of the student relocations the more one is inclined to feel that this may be one of the chief means of preventing the internment camp relocation from becoming a catastrophe in our national life. Otherwise, we would probably have a deeply embittered minority among us for many years.
Ten years later Clarence Pickett would say, “Few undertakings by the Service Committee have ever been more completely satisfactory to me. About four thousand young people were aided in relocating to more than six hundred universities and/or colleges in various parts of the nation. Almost all of these students did very well academically, a high proportion of them won special honors, and so far as I know there were no disciplinary cases among any of them.”
The above material was taken from two books: A Procession of Friends by Daisy Newman and Witness for Humanity: A Biography of Clarence Pickett by Lawrence McK. Miller.