Ann, since this series, this specific chapter of our Chapters series is exploring concepts of incarceration, I think it would be a missed opportunity if we didn't talk about your experience with incarceration. So, if you will, would you please tell us a story of the younger Anne who was punished for doing what was right?

[00:02:40] Burroughs: This is a curveball, I wasn't expecting. I wasn't expecting to do this, but I can, you know, I can certainly touch on it. So, I was a young activist in South Africa. Obviously, you know, you hear from my accent that I'm South African. And increasingly over my late teenage years and my years at university, I became increasingly involved in the anti-apartheid movement. You know, the work that we were doing around organizing against injustice, working for democracy, working for a non-racial South Africa, which was very much part of what we did. And it was certainly embedded in all the work that we did. And eventually, I was picked up. I'd been arrested briefly in the past, but eventually, I was picked up in 1986, as part of national state of emergency regulations. So I was held for just under six months. And I was held initially in a small, I was living in a university town. I'd finished my studies, but I was working at the university. And I was, when I was arrested, I was initially held in solitary confinement in the police cells in the small town called, then it was called Grahamstown, it's now called Makanda. And then was eventually transferred to Port Elizabeth to a prison called North End Prison, where actually, Steve Biko was held several years before, before he was obviously transferred out of that to the police cells where he was killed.

So, my experience with detention was, you know, I was a white, I was a young white South African woman. So I was not by any means forced to endure what most of my compatriots who were not white had to endure. And if I look back on it, it obviously it had, it was extraordinarily difficult and extraordinarily painful. And in many ways, I don't know that one fully recovers from that experience. But I certainly do know that I was not treated in the same way as my compatriots were.

So there are a couple of things that I would say about this. The South African government, the reason I was detained, I mean, who the hell knows, but they were, they wanted a show trial, a treason trial in the Eastern Cape, which is where I lived. So there were four, there were six of us, I think that they were looking at to bring treason charges against us. They were not successful, because there was a court application for our release. And that was actually challenging the emergency regulations. The court action was not successful, neither was the challenge of the emergency regulations. But I think that, because of the international pressure they realized that they really had to release us. And part of that pressure actually came from Amnesty International. I was adopted by Amnesty, and they worked on my case. And they were really instrumental in securing my release, but also keeping me safe afterwards, because I came out of prison with a year-long banning order.

So and then the other thing that I would say, just in terms of the conditions of incarceration, because I think that that's probably also one of the things that you want to delve into. When I was held in solitary confinement, it was in a very small police cell in the town, the university town, Grahamstown, now known as Makanda, where I lived. And it was at the time where troops were in the townships, people were being killed on a daily basis. Over the course of the state of emergency, almost 300,000 people were detained. So I was being held in a cell, a small cell next to a couple of other cells where my comrades from the township were being held. My cell was 12 by 12. It was absolutely filthy, it was encrusted with feces, there was a toilet, there was a tiny little cup under a faucet in which I could wash my hands. But, you know, I was... the only showering facilities were in the morgue. And I was like three days, four days between the showering. And, of course, I never, it was only afterwards that I realized how many of whom of my compatriots had actually been on those gurneys. So it was extraordinarily difficult. But once I was released from solitary confinement, I was moved to a larger prison, and I was in a cell with five other white political detainees as well.

[00:07:54] Host: When you say this word, treason, governments looking at treason, I'm curious, are, do you see any parallels to what is happening here in the States currently as with regards to the treatment of protesters and those attempting to document ice raids and help families that are being taken away?

[00:08:18] Burroughs: Well, you know, there's been, there's been sabre rattling about, you know, treasonous acts, but I'm not aware of any kind of judicial action, or punitive action. I could be wrong. Don't quote me on that. So I'm not sure that in that sense, the parallels are the same. You know, South Africa had legislation on the books, which they had used extraordinarily effectively for almost 40 years, against political activists. So, you may recall that, for example, Nelson Mandela was, in fact, he was charged with treason and sedition, and it was a way of silencing opponents and erasing them from, from sort of public history. And also, you know, the treason charges in South Africa, if you were found guilty depending on what the circumstances were, the most extreme penalty was execution. And there were many anti-apartheid activists or liberation combatants who were executed for treason. Right.

[00:09:30] Host: So the stakes were very high.

[00:09:32] Burroughs: So in that sense, I think the stakes are different, and I'm not sure that there is, you can, you can make a clear comparison. You can't, not in terms of that.

[00:09:44] Host: So, you mentioned that Amnesty International adopted you and you became a volunteer joining that organization. I'd love for you to give our listeners, for those who may not know, an explanation of what Amnesty International does, and what your role was and is now currently with the organization.

[00:10:06] Burroughs: So my, my association with Amnesty goes back a very, very long way. Even dating back even before I was, before I was arrested, I'd been chair, I was part of an organization called the Black Sash, and we formed, it was an organization of women that was essentially pushing for providing support, paralegal support to communities that were affected by past laws, etc. But we also formed an organization, it was documenting state repression and the resistance to repression. And, you know, it was at the time where the South African government had clamped down on freedom of expression to such a point that all foreign press was banned. So it was very hard to get information out. So the information that we were gathering, we were actually smuggling out in diplomatic bags to Amnesty International. So my first association with Amnesty dated to even before they, they worked on, on my case. And then after several years after my release, when I came to this country, I actually joined the staff of Amnesty, of Amnesty International in the US and I was on staff for almost 10 years. And then several years later, I came back to the organization as part of Amnesty in the US as a member of the board and then as board chair. And I went on to chair the Global Assembly of Amnesty, which is the highest decision-making body on human rights policy that has enormous influence on human rights policy across the field. And, most recently, it's, it's a long, it's a long history. And then most recently, I was elected to the International Board of Amnesty, and I've just been made chair of the International Board of Amnesty. So it's a very, very long association.

When I think about it, it sort of feels because of what it just feels to me that I owe this extraordinary debt to this organization that I, I don't think that I will ever fully be able to repay. You know, Amnesty has been around for quite some time for over 60 years. It's evolved, it's evolved over the years from initially working sort of specifically on individual prisoners of conscience. And now, of course, it looks at a range of, it works on a range of human rights issues. It's a global organization. We're headquartered in London. And we have operations in over 60 countries with about 10 million supporters globally. And so in addition to working on specific human rights issues on specific justice issues, we also have worked very effectively on sort of thematic global campaigns. For example, we're in the midst of one on anti-authoritarianism, which is pushing back not just on the authoritarianism that we're seeing in the US, but also the rise of authoritarianism globally. And we're seeing that we're seeing that playbook happening all over. And then the other thing, which is also very important to people who probably don't know about Amnesty is that Amnesty has really been instrumental in shaping a lot of human rights policies that have become pretty much standard. For example, we were just recently, we brought out the definitive report on genocide in Gaza, which really has now, in a sense, become the standard and has been adopted by, it's become the basis for the work of many organizations. So that's, I can go on and on, but I know that you want to talk about other things as well.

[00:14:07] Host: Well, I want to bring it back to the States. And what role does Amnesty International play here in the US with regards to the aggressive detention and deportation of immigrants?

[00:14:19] Burroughs: So Amnesty has a very active, quite a robust campaign on detentions, pushing back against the building of the detention centers. And this isn't new. You know, this isn't new. This is work that Amnesty has been doing for a very, very long time because obviously the mass detentions that we're seeing now are... This is, the scale of it, put it this way, the scale of it is new. But the detentions of migrants and of sort of undocumented people is not new in this country. So Amnesty has worked on this for a very long time. And now I think that we join with other organizations that are working on this. And also focusing specifically, we've also focused specifically on particular detention centers, because it's always easier when you're doing a campaign, a public facing campaign to provide some sort of personal testimony, some sort of, to personalize it, because it's much easier for people to sort of understand the loss, and the horror, and the grief, and the fear, and just the injustice as well.

[00:15:32] Host: When you see that human component.

[00:15:34] Burroughs: Yeah, to see that human, that human touch.

[00:15:36] Host: So this past August, keeping on this concept of immigration and ICE, ICE agents came en masse, outside of the Japanese American National Museum to make arrests, but really disrupting the speech of Governor Gavin Newsom. Tell us about the historical significance of their presence at that place, and how it affected you and your staff and the community.

[00:16:08] Burroughs: So we had hosted Governor Newsom to do a press conference on Proposition 50. And not because we took any position on it, but regardless of what one's position is, it's a very important issue for democracy, and we have the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy at the museum, where we bring people together to talk about difficult issues relating to whether it's identity, race, social justice, or the fragility of democracy. So we really do try and have these difficult conversations, and also talk about, as I said, the issues that are important to democracy. And this, we believed was a critically important issue. As the program was starting, we got word that it was actually the Customs and Border Patrol, that there were upwards of 75 masked and armed agents that had come onto our plaza. There's no question that it was an act of provocation, and it was a deliberate attempt to try and disrupt the proceedings of what was happening in the Democracy Center. And of course, it didn't, but it also did detract some of the media retention away from what was happening. They did arrest somebody, you know, he has subsequently been released, and he was actually a vendor of one of our tenants. But what was so outrageous, I mean, first of all, it was absolutely outrageous that they did this. But what was also outrageous was that they came onto our plaza. And for us, the museum, for Japanese Americans, that's considered to be hallowed ground. Because that's where many of LA's Japanese American families were forced to line up on the way to boarding the buses that would take them onto the assembly centers and to the incarceration. So for us, we see that as being one of those ground zero points in the civil rights history of this country. So to have them come onto our plaza felt like such a, besides being a provocation, it felt like such a violation.

[00:18:33] Host: In the US, in our history books, this story of over 120,000 Japanese Americans, it's relegated to maybe a couple of paragraphs. I'm fascinated in these conversations that I have, I'm fascinated how little, based off of my audience, how little most people know about this history. And even those people whose families were impacted by it. In your studies, in South Africa, how much of this history did you know before coming to the States?

[00:19:14] Burroughs: I knew nothing about it. I knew nothing about the incarceration. I heard about it shortly after I came. And the reason I heard about it was because there was a leader in the Japanese American community happened to be on the board of Amnesty in the US. And he was the first person that actually told me about the incarceration, an extraordinary man called Bill Watanabe. And then I also heard it through the anti-apartheid networks from another extraordinary leader called Mike Murase, who was Maxine Waters' field director. And he was sort of charged with working, he was given the responsibility for leading a lot of her work on pushing back against apartheid and the sort of anti-apartheid movement. So I met him very shortly after I came. And he was one of the people and it just completely blew my mind, because I'd never heard about it. And then I very quickly tried to educate myself as much as I could, because one learns around the world about the civil rights movement. But one only ever thinks of it, well, we'd certainly only ever, ever thought of it in terms of it being a black liberation struggle. And, you know, that there were white, there were Caucasian allies, and that there were a lot of people across the board. But we never, we never, we never learned about this. We never thought about it being a sort of pan-civil rights movement.

[00:20:45] Host: Yeah. I mean, this history needs to be told.

[00:20:49] Burroughs: Yeah.

[00:20:51] Host: These stories need to be shared. I mean, it's because of that relegation to just a couple of paragraphs, if that, we need this history to be told. But how does JANM balance representing that, that traumatic history that affected so many here on the West Coast, with celebrating all the other aspects that make Japanese American culture so unique and vital? Because it, you want to have that memorial, but that's not all that your museum does. Right.

[00:21:31] Burroughs: Right. So it certainly is a balance, because our mission is based deeply in a celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity. That's what our mission is founded on, but doing so through the Japanese American lens. We're a cultural history museum, we're a center for the arts, and we're a center for civil rights. We also are, we're founded, our DNA comes from this extraordinary moment of injustice in history. JANM was founded as a beacon for civil rights and democracy. Our founders might not have used those words, but it wasn't just to preserve the story and to preserve the artifacts and preserve the retelling, the ability to retell the experiences, but it was also so that what happened to Japanese Americans would never be repeated to any other group. So, for JANM, we're as much a place of memory and truth and justice, where history isn't just preserved for the sake of history, but it's also preserved to be able to confront the contemporary threats to democracy and human dignity. And part of telling the Japanese American story is also remembering the extraordinary resilience of this community, and the extraordinary joy in the culture and the depth of just the diversity in the community, because you can no longer just speak of, the Japanese American community is so much bigger and broader now than it was 20 or, you know, even 30 years ago.

So I think for us, it's always trying to find that balance, but it's also never forgetting what is in our DNA, why we exist. So it's finding that balance. And this year, given the difficulty and the sort of almost just the extraordinary injustice and the broad signs that we've seen against, you know, First Amendment principles, which are so fundamental to museums being able to tell the truth fully and wholly whether you're a history museum, whether you're an art museum, or whether you're a science museum, but it's been extraordinarily difficult, you know, trying to find that balance. But we're always reminded, you know, when we sort of delve into the arts, the arts tell such an unbelievably poignant story, and they're able to, you know, the arts can communicate in ways that nothing else can, and it communicates, you know, it can communicate the pain and the grief and the injustice, but it also communicates the extraordinary joy and if we don't have that joy, we can't build the resilience that we need in order to be able to take on the erosion of civil rights.

[00:24:36] Host: I think you were kind of alluding to this, but we're talking about the importance of history and the importance of sharing that history. But on March 27, President Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. And in this, he states, our nation's unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. It also orders to take action to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior's jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparages Americans past their living. So, how has this been playing out? You mentioned museums. How has this been playing out over the last several months, and to what detriment?

[00:25:44] Burroughs: Our trustees came out with a statement in the middle of February, literally three weeks after the inauguration. And it was a very, very powerful statement by our trustees in defense of history, democracy, and civil rights. And this was long before any other museum was speaking out, and we were the first. And for the longest time, we were the only museum, and we've consistently remained one of the strongest voices on this issue. And there was certain prescience. You know, the writing was on the wall with the inauguration, very, very shortly after the inauguration all of the pointers were there. And gradually, the assault and the erasure of history became much, much more apparent. If you look at the actions that have been taken by the administration from that March executive order through to the present, you know, to my mind, when I look at it, I see it as being almost like a campaign to dismantle foundational principles of the First Amendment, diversity, democracy, you know, suppressing historical narratives that challenge that kind of vision. And I think also, it's a very, very deliberate attempt to erase the contributions of people of color, of women, of LGBTQIA plus individuals, and other marginalized groups. So there's this attempt to sort of homogenize American history, and also to homogenize American culture. So it's very, very definite. I mean, we know that it's an ideological attempt. And it's also, it's really doubling down into that thing, that whole notion of American exceptionalism, because it ignores the diversity of the culture, and it's suppressing that kind of expression.

What we also see in addition to that executive order, we've also seen the dismantling of federal agencies that support museums and libraries. And that's been extraordinarily damaging, because it's meant that it's been almost this sort of wholesale attempt to erase history. We've seen what's happened with the national parks, we've seen what's happening at the Smithsonian. But the implications stretch way beyond that, I think, because it really goes to, sort of goes to this attempt at sort of this revisionist approach to history. And we have to, we have to stand up to that. Because something that I've said often, and I'm not alone in this at all, is that history doesn't yield to censorship, or political ideologies. When we think about the Japanese American experience, that history, and we talked about it earlier in the podcast, how few people know about it. And how, in a sense, that history was erased, that knowledge, that information was erased from public history. It's not taught in schools, it is in California. And if we don't, if we're not intentional about working towards that, then that kind of homogenization happens. And that memory, that memory is lost, which, you know, is such an important thing.

And this gets to something that I think is really important for organizations like JANM, not just JANM, you know, there are many museums that are not just in the Japanese American community, but across the country, history museums, you know, how we tell the story is important, who tells the story is important, and what is chosen to be told. And it also comes, you know, there's the whole issue of memory, I think, is extraordinarily important, too. And that for us it's something that we think about more and more at JANM. You know, what our role is in, because if you think about preserving history, or you think about preserving culture, or uplifting culture, to a very large extent, you are talking about memory, you are talking about preserving memory. So, when you're pushing back against this attempt to erase history, essentially, memory, almost then becomes, in itself, becomes an act of resilience and an act of resistance. And it shouldn't be, but that's kind of what it becomes. Because if you are having to combat erasure, you have to uphold memory. It's like an act of memory. I mean, it's like an act of, you know, whatever, it almost becomes a different a different part of speech. But I think that what we are really trying to do as well is to be able to harness that, that memory to defend democracy and to defend individuals. And with the work that we do at our Democracy Center, we look at the– we use the echoes of history to shine that light on the present and to inform the future. But it's always bringing what was true in history and what is true now.

I remember when I first came to JANM in 2016, which was in the run up to the Trump's first election, and was the first time that we were hearing on, you know, on national campaigns talking about using the Japanese American incarceration as a precedent for what to do with, you know, Muslim Americans, and it was the time of the travel bans, and, you know, what to do with quote, unquote, illegal immigrants. And it was shocking. We look at how we stood up and with outrage we look at 2017. And what happened then was extraordinarily unjust. And we compared that with now, we were talking in 2016, about there not being a lot of distance. And for us at JANM, we're standing up as this promise that this would never happen again. And of course, now we find ourselves in this situation where it exactly is happening again.

[00:32:02] Host: You know, one of the things that, that executive order says is that the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe. And I would argue that sharing that history, the history of the bigoted, racist, shameful, and harmful things that America has done shows the progress of how we've grown as a nation, how we've learned, how we've evolved from our mistakes, while also honoring those who have suffered because of those mistakes. We talk about memory, I mean, there's almost like this manipulation of what is remembered now too, like, oh, no, you remember that incorrectly, or that wasn't how it was. And as we are almost in one generation of this kind of political anomaly, where does that memory go when you have a generation who wasn't taught this or where this history was erased?

[00:33:30] Burroughs: I don't know. I mean, I have a pat answer to that, but I think it's extraordinarily complex. You know, it's extraordinarily complex, so much of it has to do with how we receive information, how we process information, and what information is shared. Which is why I think that the role of museums of places like JANM are so important, other cultural history museums are so important, because it really is, and why humanities are so important. Because I think that if we can harness memory, or if we can have people think about sort of ancestral memory, as a way to defend democratic ideals, as a way to ask ourselves those really critical questions about how do we become good ancestors? Who do we want to be? Who do we want our children to be? How do we use those lessons of history to shape a more just future? I see these things as not being rhetorical questions, rather I see them as actually being quite urgent. And I don't know what the answer is. I don't know what the answer is. I mean, there are times when I really feel quite despondent about all of this. But I also know if we get back to that issue of that March executive order, and we think about what this nation is, and we think about what makes it so extraordinary is the warts and all history, because it's the warts and all history that has made the country so extraordinarily powerful. And it's the warts and all history that have created a set of values, that we are, with the best intention, able to unite around.

What I would also say about museums, and certainly, I say this about JANM, museums aren't neutral. You know, I think it's a myth to think, it's completely incorrect to think that museums can be neutral. Because we're civic institutions, and we're deeply, deeply embedded in the community. We're shaped, if you're a history museum, you're shaped by the histories of the community that you serve. If you're an art museum, you're shaped by the art of the communities that you serve. So I just feel that museums are so critical in shaping civic life.

When our trustees made the statement that I spoke about earlier on this extraordinarily powerful statement in the middle of February in defense of democracy, civil rights, and history, it wasn't as an act of defiance, or an act of protest. It really was in, it was deeply personal, and it was in defense of their own parents, grandparents, etc, who had been incarcerated. And I think certainly for us at JANM, we have this incredibly strong sense that we have the luxury to be able to stand up, because we have our trustees behind us. I mean, they're setting, you know, they're setting the direction for us. Our donors are behind us, our members are behind us, we're also in the blue state. The philanthropic community has been extraordinarily supportive, and they've been behind us. But we also know that the reason we have to stand up is because nobody stood up for Japanese Americans in 1942. So we feel this tremendous obligation to be able to stand up, to speak out as strongly as we can. But we also know that in the museum field, not all museums have the luxury to do this, because they don't have their donor communities, they don't have their member communities behind them. And many of them are in red states. And for many of them, business as usual, is an act of courage. You know, we can stand up and say, we're unbound, you know, we will scrub nothing, we will not scrub our websites, we will continue not just to do business as usual, but to speak out and to do programming, that really gives life to what it means to be able to speak out at the museum.

[00:37:46] Host: We'd like to thank Anne Burroughs and the Japanese American National Museum. Chapterspodcast was produced by Past Forward and made possible with support from Chapman University and California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library. For more information, visit pastforward.org, chapman.edu, and library.ca.gov.