Washington’s famed summer mugginess was already apparent that day in late May, 2012. Jay Hirabayashi, ’73 BA, was in town for a presentation in the White House, where his dad’s wife, Susan Carnahan, ’80 BA, was accepting the Presidential Medal of Freedom on behalf of Gordon Hirabayashi. The senior Hirabayashi had died in Edmonton at 93, just a few months before the presentation.
“I had posted about his death on Facebook, and I started getting calls from news outlets across North America soon after,” Jay says. As if those calls weren’t enough, and as if the presentation from Barack Obama didn’t signify the importance of Jay’s father, there was also the matter of the other recipients of the medal that day: astronaut John Glenn, lawmaker Madeleine Albright, novelist Toni Morrison, musician Bob Dylan.
But kids never really get that their parents had whole lives before they came on the scene. Growing up as he did, the son of an American academic, Jay had moved around with the family while his dad researched and lectured in sociology at universities in the Middle East in the 1950s. Gordon took a position at the University of Alberta in 1959, where he cemented his reputation as an academic, becoming the first chair of the Department of Sociology while raising the family with his first wife, Jay’s mom, Esther, before they divorced.
As they were growing up, Jay and his sisters, twins Sharon Yuen, ’67 Dip(Nu), ’69 BScN, and Marion Oldenburg, ’67 Dip(Nu), ’68 BScN, didn’t really grasp the significance of Gordon’s contributions at the vanguard of the civil rights movement in the United States.
“We were far removed from the historical location, Seattle, and the context of his efforts,” Jay explains. “He had told us as kids that he had been to jail, but I don’t think we really understood.”
It wasn’t until Jay left Edmonton after high school to work at a ski resort in Colorado while he trained as a ski racer that he learned his dad was much more than a respectable, bespeckled humanities professor.
“I worked with this American law student at the resort and when he heard my last name, he asked about my dad,” Jay says. “He said he was taught that my dad’s case was one of the few times the Supreme Court had made a mistake.” That mistake had been preceded by an injustice.
Hirabayashi vs. United States
During the Second World war, the American government required Japanese-Americans to resettle from their homes on the West Coast to internment camps. Then-24-year-old Seattle resident Gordon Hirabayashi declined unconditionally to be resettled. Instead, he surrendered to the FBI, ready to face the legal challenge. He was convicted of curfew violation and sentenced to 90 days in an Arizona prison camp. Gordon appealed his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, losing in Hirabayashi vs. United States in 1943.
Forty years later, soon after retiring from the U of A in 1983, Gordon received a call from California political scientist Peter Irons who had come across a document while researching court archives. It proved the U.S. government had misrepresented the necessity of internment in Hirabayashi’s Supreme Court case. They appealed the case.
Citing government misconduct, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1987 overturned Gordon’s wartime criminal conviction. “The U.S. government admitted it made a mistake,” Gordon said at the time. “A country that can do that is a strong country. I have more faith and allegiance to the constitution than I ever had before."
Hold These Truths
This remarkable life story is little known in Alberta, Gordon’s home for 30-plus years, where he raised his family, built his career and eventually died on the same day as Jay’s mom, on Jan. 2, 2012.
But those early days have been captured by Jeanne Sakata in a play called Hold These Truths, which makes its Alberta debut on May 5 at the Timms Centre for the Arts. It stars Vancouver actor Kevin Takahide Lee under the direction of Melanie Dreyer-Lude, chair of the U of A’s Department of Drama. Gordon’s widow Susan, Jay and other family members will see the the play during its run.
“Gordon took a lot of pride in being here,” Lee says. “He had several job offers but saw the potential of the sociology department. He could have gone back anytime to America, but he recognized that he had a claim in the Edmonton community, so he ended up staying there for the rest of his life.”
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