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4d

Voices of our American Principles

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”

In spite of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s eloquence about the Four Freedoms, he signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, just thirteen months after his Four Freedoms speech, paving the way for the forced relocation of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans from California and other west coast states, families like the Munemitsus, a grave miscarriage of justice for which the United States eventually apologized and provided reparations to survivors.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
American President
(1882-1945)

“From very early on, I was motivated and wanted to go to school. Whatever I learned in school, it was mine to have and to hold. And it didn’t matter how many times we moved — that knowledge, that learning would go with me. Learning, education became the stability I was looking for.”

Francisco Jimenez
Author of The Circuit and Breaking Through
Professor at Santa Clara University
(born 1943)

“Freedom, by definition, is people realizing that they are their own leaders.”

Diane Nash
Civil Rights Activist, Leader of the Freedom Riders Movement
(born 1938)

“The faces from the photographs staring up at me as I searched for my family in the National Archives have always haunted me. I wanted to know the story behind the faces and discover how they survived and created a new life after the war.

… I also felt they all had the spirit of gambatte (‘don’t give up and do your best’).”

Paul Kitagaki, Jr.
Photographer, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Creator of the Exhibition “Gambatte: Legacy of an Enduring Spirit”
(1954 – Present)

“Of what avail is our theory of democracy if the principles of equal rights, of equal protection and equal obligations are not practiced?

Of what use are the four freedoms if freedom is not allowed?

Of what avail are the thousands upon thousands of lives of Mexican Americans who sacrificed their all for their country in this great ‘War of Freedom’ if freedom of education is denied them?

Of what avail is our ‘education’ if the system that propounds it denies the equality of all? From Judge McCormick’s ruling in Mendez v. Westminster, 1946.”

Hon. Paul J. McCormick
Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California
(1879-1960)