who was gordon hirabayashi?
A principled stand
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW38014.
Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi was born on April 23, 1918, in a farming community just outside of Seattle, Washington. He credited his Japanese-born parents, Shungo and Mitsuko, for instilling in him a deep commitment to staying true to his conscience. As a young man, Gordon’s pacifist convictions and Christian beliefs led him to join the ‘Religious Society of Friends’ (Quakers), a faith community to which he would remain committed for the rest of his life.
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW41485.
When Gordon was a student at the University of Washington in 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. This act of war precipitated the evacuation and relocation order for people of Japanese ancestry living on the west coast of the United States. Believing this to be a violation of his citizenship under the U.S. Constitution, Gordon delivered a letter to the local FBI office declaring, “I consider it my duty to maintain the democratic standards for which this nation lives. Therefore, I must refuse this order for evacuation.” Gordon was charged with violation of the order, found guilty, and sentenced to 90 days in a prison camp near Tucson, Arizona. Due to a lack of government transportation, he made his own way to the camp by hitchhiking across several states, insisting he serve out his sentence in its entirety.
An academic leader
Following the war, Gordon earned his BA, MA, and PhD degrees in Sociology from the University of Washington in less than six years. For his doctoral thesis, he studied the societal treatment of the Doukhobors in British Columbia. He taught at the American University in Beirut and later in Cairo, before joining the University of Alberta in 1959. Dr. Hirabayashi was one of the founding professors in the Department of Sociology in 1961 and served as Chair from 1963–1970, leading the new department through a time of rapid growth and societal discord.
University of Alberta Archives, Gordon Hirabayashi Biographical file.
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW41484.
Early in his career he launched a ground-breaking study on Metis settlements in Northern Alberta, and the following year he chaired the inaugural Western Canada Indian-Metis seminar with close to 100 delegates attending. His academic research―while wide and varied―primarily focused on race and ethnic relations, visible minorities, and the Japanese Canadian experience. He traveled extensively to attend academic conferences, fulfilling his role as co-chair of the national Asian Canadian Symposium in the 1970s and 80s. Dr. Hirabayashi was a generous mentor with graduate students and highly esteemed by his colleagues, receiving two honorary doctorate degrees and numerous accolades.
A HUMAN RIGHTS CHAMPION
In the early 1980s, an American civil rights attorney approached Dr. Hirabayashi with newly declassified evidence from WWII. His case was reopened, and it was successfully argued that government documents had been suppressed as evidence in the original trial. On September 24, 1987, his original conviction was overturned and his record cleared. This legal victory bolstered the Japanese redress campaigns in the United States and Canada, on which Dr. Hirabayashi had worked diligently for a decade. His influential advocacy as a member of the National Redress Committee with the NAJC (National Association of Japanese Canadians) centred the dialogue of redress on principles of human rights rather than simply a matter of ethnicity. Redress was finally awarded to Japanese Canadians in September, 1988.
Dr. Hirabayashi remained actively involved in the cause of human rights for as long as he was able, and contributed locally for many years to the EJCA (Edmonton Japanese Community Association). He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in May 2012, the highest civilian honour awarded in the United States. The NAJC created the biannual Dr. Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Award and the University of Alberta established the annual Dr. Gordon Hirabayashi Graduate Scholarship in Sociology, both to recognize and support research and contributions to human rights and social justice in Canada.