American Citizen #1, John L. Newman

“American Citizen #1 is one of two collaborative prints with Professor Roger Shimomura. This print depicts our different perspectives about the same situation in different places. I was born in Rohwer, Arkansas, in 1948, three years after the ending of World War II. My hometown was one of ten sites for Japanese Internment during the war. During my time at KU, I learned that Roger’s family had been interned at Minidoka, Idaho, when he was a small child. In a conversation with my mother about Roger’s experiences, she mentioned that Rohwer had been one of the sites for the Japanese concentration camps during the war, much to my surprise.
My mother was raised in the Jim Crow South, where Blacks had few rights and opportunities. Blacks went to substandard schools and employment in the rural south consisted of jobs such as sharecroppers, field hands chopping and picking cotton, cooks, housekeepers, loggers, or other low-paying physical work.
The internment of the Japanese resulted in an economic boom for that area. My mother recounted a story of her cousin getting a job carrying Japanese prisoners and supplies from the train station to the camp. It is poignant to note that my mother spoke of the ‘freedom’ that the Japanese had that was denied to Blacks in the town, the food that was thrown out of the camp that the prisoners would not eat (while Black families were often on the brink of starvation), and the school and housing that were built for Japanese prisoners (while Blacks traveled over 19 miles to a Blacks only school in Arkansas City, and lived in subpar housing).
You can see the faint lines of the barbed wire fence in the prints suggesting the juxtaposition of these perspectives depending on which side of the fence you reside.”
—John L. Newman