EO: Okay. My name is Eimi Okano, longtime resident of Palo Alto, and we moved to Palo Alto around 1966. And one of the early organizations that we became active in was the Palo Alto Buddhist Temple. And when I first arrived there, I knew the minister's wife from previous occasions, and she said, "I know just the person I want you to meet." And she introduced me to Jeannette. And I did not know anything about Jeannette at the time. And we got to know each other better as we did different activities at the temple belonging to the women's group and being active with the children's Sunday school classes that we jointly taught. So, and then that's where it's all started. And our kids were in school, the same Palo Alto Unified, and the issues were interesting in and becoming more so when Jeannette was active with her PTA and the chair of the committee for... I don't know what it's called, activism? Legal compliance?
JA: Human Relations.
EO: Human Relations. It's a nice name. Human Relations Committee. And through that, she became interested in the fact that there was no representation of people of color in textbooks. And so she thought it would be interesting to see whether in the course of the school that the kids went through, whether they would ever be exposed to stories about other people besides the white people. And so we started looking at textbooks, and examining each one of the textbooks and counting faces and realizing that there were if there were people of color at all, it was colored in faces. In other words, it was white first, and they just put some color over the faces. So that was what our experience was in looking at textbooks. And therefore, Jeanette decided that we should count heads and have a record of what we really found in K-8 textbooks. And so she got a committee together. And there were, let's see. Martha Holman, who a wife of a doctor and active with Stanford University as well as Palo Alto Unified. And there's Mallory, who was a PTA person who worked with Jeanette and Marie Bryant. She was. I guess she was active at Gunn High School, I wasn't sure where she came from.
JA: Cubberly.
EO: Cubberly. But she was African American. So our committee itself was made up of two of us. And Marie, who was African American, and then two Anglo Americans. So the five of us were going through the textbooks and came up with a hole. I wish we had computers in those days, but, you know, in those days what we did was we counted heads and had "one, two, three, four, five and cross" and counted heads that way in the textbooks and put it together on graph paper. So that took a lot of time. But with the five of us, we were able to put together a report for Jeanette, who was the head of the committee. She helped to define what our each step would be, trying to bring the point across that there were no representation of people of color who contributed anything to the textbooks at all. And that began our journey to look at what it would take. And Jeanette was the one that did all the research that it took to find out how to get things changed at the state level so that textbooks would then be reflective of what our population is of today. So, ok Jeanette. And that's that's how we got started with counting heads, then making a report to the State Board of Education.
JA: I can still remember Eimi's daughter, Kerry, oldest child, saying “unidentifiable non-whites”. That was the expression that Eimi had going to describe people who were unidentifiable, but they were non-whites. And I think at this particular point in our history, there are more non-describable, let's see, undescribable non-whites than probably any other. Describes more people than any other people at this moment. And there was a paucity of undescribable non-whites. But one of the things that we did is decide that we would try to illustrate a point, and we put together a montage of faces of a variety of color and ethnicities, and we took it to Escondido School's third grade. And then we asked the question, "Point out which are the Americans in this picture." And the only people that they pointed out were the whites.
EO: And these are pictures that we got from Life magazine that we knew were American pictures of Americans, not of foreigners. And that's why we put it together in that way and could ask that question and feel like if they identified anybody of color, that they were American, because it came from a description that showed that they were a part of the United States.
JA: I think part of the the disgust that I felt was because of my past experience of being identified as an enemy.
EO: Yes. But I you know, I was five years old at the time. She was close to ten. And so at ten and the teenage years, I think that population of Japanese Americans really suffered more of the name calling and identifying and pointing rather than me at five years of age. So I didn't experience it to the extent that I heard other people tell stories of what happened with them as they were a little bit older. So yeah, it was very painful. And it marks you when it when you're impressionable at an impressionable age and told that you're not an American.
I think one of the early things that got us interested in doing something about it was that there was a textbook. No, there was a book that was written on Japanese Americans, "The Untold Story." And in that particular book, it told the story of Japanese American kids in camp, etc. But in it was an erroneous, demeaning aspect of description of Buddhism. And I think that's what made us say that this cannot be adopted by the State Board of Education as a textbook to be read by all students, because that's going to re-emphasize discrimination against people of different religions. And so Jeannette was able to shift gears a little bit there, and we were able to figure out what's going to happen with the textbooks. And she said that we had to go to the State Board of Education before they adopt this book. And in the meantime, she was talking to people of influence. She has a relative that was in higher education in the university someplace. Anyway, in trying to get the people at the university level to know that there is this erroneous passage in that book and "Would they be willing to speak up against this book?" made a big difference.
And the State Board did not adopt this book for the state education of kids, which was really a great, great milestone for us. And, you know, you get a little taste of success like that. So when you see something that's not right, you're apt to speak up again the next time. And I think that when we started looking at textbooks that the kids were looking at every day and knowing that there was this lack of inclusion of people of color at all levels of K-8, then that's when the decision to let the State Board of Education know that there was this big hole and it was Jeanette who did the research on finding out that any description of what the content of the state books would be are in the guns and ammunition or alcohol and firearms…section of the state Ed code, which was... It floored me, of all places, to have a description of what you're going to have as a description of kids in textbooks. So anyway, that started our journey on letting the state board know, and over time. they were able to see what we were trying to say. And at all the meetings that we started attending in Sacramento, the publishers were really interested in what we were saying and not too pleased with the fact that they're going to have to change their whole textbooks in terms of pictures and inclusions of stories, etc.
But as it turns out, as we were making this trip to Sacramento many times, there was also a separate group in Los Angeles who was also doing the same thing of pointing out the fact that there were no inclusion of Mexican American heritage and stories. And so we met at the State Board of Education, and both of us made our pitch to the state board saying that this had to change. And through many, many meetings back and forth, we felt that it was worthwhile, as the state board did make that decision to include this section in their State Education Code, which would then have more representation in the textbooks of kids. So that was fun.
So, you know, when we talk about activism, that counts as activism, but I think that for us as parents, just making a point of of clarification and change, it was not, you know, rallying the troops, so to speak, or feeling like the activism of today where young people are making their voices known. We kind of did what we did because it was the right thing to do, and I don't know that we ever thought of ourselves as activists at that time, but it's interesting to hear the conversation from young people here.