California State Library
Two eras, one lesson, side by side.
The Problem
The California State Library's Civil Liberties Public Education Program exists to keep the history of Japanese American incarceration from fading into an abstraction, and to connect it to civil liberties violations happening against other communities today.
As the country entered a tumultuous political era, that mandate had particular relevance. The program prioritized work connecting Japanese American incarceration to civil-rights violations affecting other communities, while the travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries had put questions of national security, immigration and religious discrimination back at the center of public debate.
My Role
I designed a visual campaign pairing archival Japanese American internment photography and testimony with contemporary voices responding to the modern travel ban, working within the program's statutory mandate to connect the two histories.
The Move
Each piece pairs a quote with a photograph, but not always from the matching era. A 1942 internee's words run over a modern photo of a Muslim American woman in an American-flag hijab. A modern quote from a Muslim community leader runs over an archival photo of Japanese American families boarding a train for an internment camp, tags on their coats. Crossed that way, the two moments become genuinely hard to sort apart without reading the attribution line, and that confusion carries the entire argument the program exists to make, visually, instead of stating it in a caption. The voices span both eras and both communities: Japanese American internees speaking in 1942, U.S. Representative Mark Takano and JACL's John Tateishi speaking in 2016 about the parallel directly, Muslim American community leaders responding to the ban in their own words.
What Happened
This had a different measure of success than a passenger count or booking rate: whether people actually engaged with the idea. The campaign's core post went live on February 19, 2017, timed to land on the exact 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, and in the short reporting period it received 3.6K reactions, 1,619 shares, and 215 comments (all organic) meaning more than 1,600 people chose to share it to their own pages unprompted. The comments did what the device was built to do: people debated whether the parallel actually held up, engaging with the substance of it rather than just reacting to the image.
