Franklin Odo is the John J. McCloy Visiting Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy at Amherst College. As part of the UMass Amherst History Department’s Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series: “The U.S. in the Age of Mass Incarceration”, Odo talked about Japanese Internment during World War II, the subsequent redress, and how Japanese Americans have been affected by discrimination.
Odo was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Program, Interim Chief of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress, and one of the founders of the field of Asian American Studies.
Odo was born in 1939 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He said that had he been born elsewhere in the U.S., “I would have been considered, at age two, a dangerous threat to national security and been forcibly removed from my home, along with my parents and siblings, into one of the assembly centers and then concentration camps.”
This talk was recorded on November 1, 2016 in Herter Hall at UMass Amherst.
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