Tag Archives: they called us enemy

George Takei Talks to School Librarians About his Upcoming Graphic Memoir They Called Us Enemy

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A few days ago, legendary actor, activist, and author George Takei visited New York to deliver the keynote address at School Library Journal‘s 14th annual Leadership Summit.

Takei spoke to an audience of key figures from schools and libraries around the United States, a vertical for comics and graphic novels that is growing quickly. During his speech, he narrated his wrenching firsthand experience in childhood as one of 120,000 Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. Takei also explored the complex lessons of patriotism and civic engagement passed down by his father, the duty of all Americans to stand up for our ideals, and his hopes for They Called Us Enemy to both educate and inspire new generations with the lessons of the past.

The graphic novel is a memoir about Takei’s experience in the internment camps and relevant today as camps are being erected again.

Next year, we will put it in your hands, you librarians, to build the future of America, to inform the young people who will become the leaders of our future that we have a glorious history… but we should also be mindful of some of the horrible mistakes that we made. As Americans, we all have a responsibility to build a better America.

They Called Us Enemy is currently in preparation for release in Summer 2019.

George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy Will Be Released in 2019, Focusing on Immigration, Incarceration, and Family Separation

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As nations around the globe confront new versions of old debates about immigration, incarceration, and family separation, actor/author/activist George Takei is preparing a beautiful and powerfully resonant graphic memoir of his own direct experience with American xenophobia.

In summer 2019, Top Shelf Productions will publish Takei’s They Called Us Enemy, created in collaboration with co-writers Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker. George Takei revisits his haunting childhood in American concentration camps, as one of 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. Readers will experience the forces that shaped an American icon — and America itself — in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.

In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten “relocation centers,” hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.

They Called Us Enemy is Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.

What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do?

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