The president of Bellevue College resigned on Monday, along with one of the school’s vice presidents, in the aftermath of an incident involving artistic censorship of a particular kind: the vice president had whited out a passage about a local businessman’s anti-Japanese activity in her posted description for a mural she created on the campus about the city’s early Japanese-American community.
Students and Nikkei community leaders held an observance ceremony Tuesday on campus after the college’s trustees voted Monday to “separate” from President Jerry Weber and Gayle Colston Barge, the school’s vice president of institutional advancement. It was Barge who apparently directed an underling to white-out a portion of artist Erin Shigaki’s description accompanying her mural, “Never Again Is Now,” outside its student activities center.
The sentence Barge ordered removed touched off a furor in Bellevue because it touched on the problematic history of the city’s founders, particularly a man named Miller Freeman (1875-1955), who was largely responsible for shaping the city into the modern, bustling suburb of Seattle it is today. It read:
“After decades of anti-Japanese agitation, led by Eastside businessman Miller Freeman and others, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans included the 60 families (300 individuals) who farmed Bellevue.”
After the white-out attempt, Barge apparently had an underling place a “corrected” version of the description with the sentence simply removed atop the white-out version.
Barge, an African American woman, later apologized, calling the decision to remove the sentence “a stupid, impulsive act.” She reportedly told staff at the time she did it “to protect any member of the Freeman family.”
In fact, Freeman not only was one of the most powerful men in Washington state, he was also one of its most outspoken and unrepentant white supremacists. He particularly had a lifelong hatred of Japanese, and near the end of his life had played an instrumental role not only in ensuring their wartime incarceration in concentration camps, but had even harassed neighboring Japanese in Bellevue about their “loyalty” during the weeks preceding the internment.
At Tuesday’s ceremony, Shigaki led a commemoration for the original reason for her mural, erected in early February near the anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066 by Franklin Roosevelt in 1942, which cleared the way for the U.S. military to order the removal and detention of 110,000 Japanese Americans along the entire Pacific Coast in concentration camps.
The ceremony included a roll-call reading of the names of the “relocation centers”—the War Relocation Authority’s euphemism for the concentration camps it hastily erected in the spring and summer of 1942 in a variety of remote locations, mostly around the interior West: Manzanar—by Shigaki: “Manzanar. Tule Lake. Poston. Gila River. Granada. Heart Mountain. Minidoka. Topaz. Rohwer. Jerome.”
As she spoke each name, a person holding an engraved plaque with the camp name on it stepped forward and joined a line assembled in front of the mural, which shows two children about to be sent off to the camps.
On Wednesday, Weber—who had sent out a letter of apology to students and staff on Feb. 24—announced he was resigning. He will be replaced on an interim basis by Provost Kristen Jones. Jones spoke briefly with Daily Kos on Tuesday, saying she hoped the school could “heal” from the incident.
Jordana Maciel, head of the Asian Pacific Islander Student Association—which helped organize Tuesday’s ceremony, and had spearheaded student petitions to protest the mural defacement, told Daily Kos that “this was never our intention.” She said the controversy had nonetheless sparked a “healthy discussion” on campus.
The board of trustees made it clear that the school’s initial steps to deal with the issue were inadequate. “We need to do something to make this better, so an apology, as heartfelt as it has been, is not really enough,” Chairman Rich Fukutaki told the Seattle Times. “With that in mind, the board has determined a change in leadership is necessary.”