“The People of Clarendon County”— A Play by Ossie Davis, & the Answer to Racism!*
Jack K Hasegawa
In addition to the performance of the play several unsung heroes of the civil rights movement will be honored including –
Jack Hasegawa
As a young college student, Mr. Hasegawa stood with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to protest segregation and participate in community organization in the South during the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement. His travels took him to Nashville and Atlanta. Subsequently, he was appointed to serve on committees under the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights. His other work related to the advancement of democracy and human took place in the Roxbury section of Boston; Osaka and Kyoto, Japan; Taipei, Taiwan; and Seoul, Korea.
While working for Yale University, Mr. Hasegawa led Dwight Hall, Yale’s center for community service and social change. He was the director of the Yale Asian American Culture Center, and a member of the President’s Minority Student Affairs Council. He has served on numerous advisory boards for the University of Connecticut, including the Neag School of Education Advisory Council on Diversity and the Asian American Studies Institute.
Mr. Hasegawa is currently Executive Director of the The 4-H Education Center at Auer Farm in Bloomfield, CT.
He was project manager for the Connecticut State Department of Education on a number of panels and special projects growing out of Connecticut’s official responses to the landmark “Sheff v. O’Neill” decision, and led regional planning efforts to improve educational quality and diversity.
He has supervised a variety of programs and projects intended to reduce racial, ethnic and economic isolation, and to address issues of fairness in public education. This includes magnet schools, charter schools, inter-district cooperative programs, OPEN CHOICE, Title IX programs, federal civil rights compliance reviews, and multicultural education. He has worked as a consultant and lecturer on diversity issues for a variety of educational institutions, businesses and non-profit organizations, including Harvard College, AT&T and the United Nations.
The Hasegawa family was among the 120,000 Japanese Americans interned in the U.S. in barbed-wire “Relocation Centers” during World War II. His parents married while incarcerated at one of these centers in Poston, Arizona. Jack was born in Greeley, Colorado, where his parents were on a work-release program harvesting sugar beets.
He earned a Master’s Degree in Theological Studies from Harvard University. For his work in advancing freedom and human rights in Taiwan in the 1960’s, the President of Taiwan invited Mr. and Mrs. Hasegawa to Taipei and presented him a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.
