K. Patrick Okura, official in LA, civil rights leader; 93
LOS ANGELES -- K. Patrick Okura, a onetime Los Angeles city official who turned his anger over his imprisonment in a World War II relocation camp for Japanese-Americans into a passion for social justice as a civil rights leader and mental health specialist, died Jan. 30 of coronary artery disease at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 93.
A psychologist trained at the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Okura was a major figure in the history of the Japanese American Citizens League, a 75-year-old civil rights organization that he led as national president during the early 1960s. Among his achievements was prodding the leadership of the group to take a visible stand on the struggle for racial equality by joining the 1963 March on Washington, D.C., led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Two decades later, Mr. Okura and his wife, Lily, were among the 60,000 Japanese-American survivors of the wartime internment camps who each received a $20,000 reparations payment from the federal government and an apology letter from President George H. W. Bush under the 1988 Civil Liberties Act signed into law by President Reagan. The Okuras used their combined $40,000 to fund the Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation.
Mr. Okura belonged to the generation of Japanese-Americans who by and large tried to bury their painful memories of the war years, when the federal government uprooted 120,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast after Japan's attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941, and sent them to internment camps in 11 states.
But Mr. Okura was not inclined to passively submit to discrimination. The Los Angeles native had bought his immigrant parents a house when he was 18 after learning that laws that barred them from becoming citizens also prevented them from owning their own home. At UCLA, he became the first Japanese-American to play varsity baseball.
By 1933, he had earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in psychology from UCLA. By 1938, he was the chief personnel examiner for the Los Angeles Civil Service Commission and the city's highest-ranking Japanese-American.
Then came the attack on Pearl Harbor, a shocking assault on US forces that unleashed waves of anti-Japanese hysteria. Syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson alleged that Mr. Okura was overseeing a force of 50 Japanese spies who planned to sabotage the city's Department of Water and Power. He also accused Mr. Okura of trying to pass as Irish by spelling his name O'Kura. Mayor Fletcher Bowron twice demanded Mr. Okura's resignation, but he refused both times. Mr. Okura told The
Eventually, 39 municipal employees of Japanese descent were ordered off the job for the duration of the war. Most of the workers left quickly, but Mr. Okura was one of the few who tried -- unsuccessfully -- to resist. A Los Angeles Times article on Jan. 22, 1942, described him as a "holdout" who "delayed stepping out of his job until the last moment."
Shortly afterward, Mr. Okura and his bride of barely two months found themselves sleeping on straw mattresses in a room at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, Calif., where thousands of Japanese-Americans suspected of disloyalty because of their heritage eventually would be detained.
Sponsored by the Rev. Edward Flanagan, Mr. Okura left the camp to become staff psychologist for Boys Town in Omaha. When the war ended, the Okuras stayed on for 17 years.
Mr. Okura, who leaves his wife of 63 years, had no children.
