This week the University of Southern California apologized for its treatment of Japanese-American students during WWII and granted them honorary degrees — mostly posthumously. The students in this photo include my father’s classmates and friends. He described their abrupt disappearance as “an infamy of America’s own.” Notably, the president of USC at the time, Rufus vonKleinsmid, whom my father always considered a Nazi for his well-known anti-Semitism, refused to even release the Japanese students’ transcript to prevent them from transferring to colleges off the West Coast. You can read more about this period in Chapter 8 of my book. And news coverage of USC’s current actions can be found here and here and here.
