Ralph Lazo, Hispanic Student Who Voluntarily Entered Japanese-American Internment Camps, Born
Ralph Lazo, who as a Hispanic high school student in Los Angeles voluntarily entered a Japanese-American internment camp in an act of racial\ethnic solidarity, was born on this day.
As a 17 year-old student at Belmont High School in Los Angeles in May 1942, Lazo became outraged when he learned that his fellow Japanese-American students and neighbors were being forcibly evacuated and then detained at the Manzanar Relocation Camp. In a remarkable act of racial and ethnic solidarity, he joined a group of Japanese-American friends and took the train taking them to Manzanar. Government officials never asked him about his ancestry.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the evacuation of the Japanese-Americans from the west coast by Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. The Supreme Court first upheld the constitutionality of a curfew on Japanese Americans in Hirabayashi v. United States, and then upheld the constitutionality of the evacuation and internment in Korematsu v. United States.
Lazo’s father was Mexican-American and his mother, who died when Ralph was young, was Irish-American.
In the camp, Ralph was elected class president at the Manzanar High School. Years later, Lazo declared that his Japanese-American friends “hadn’t done anything that I hadn’t done except to go to Japanese language school.”
In August 1944, while still at Manzanar, he was inducted into the U.S. Army, rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant and helped to liberate the Philippines. He was awarded the Bronze Star for heroism, and served until 1946.
After leaving the army Lazo graduated from UCLA and then earned a Master’s degree from California State University – Northridge. He spent his career teaching. Lazo died in 1992.
See the movie: Stand Up for Justice: The Ralph Lazo Story (2004)
Learn more about Ralph Lazo at Unsung Heroes.
Read: Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (2001)
Read about the evacuation and internment: Peter Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese-American Internment Cases (1983)