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My father, Peter Hiroshi Igarashi, got out of camp in about six months. He and his family were incarcerated in Tule Lake. My Dad said because Quakers were conscientious objectors and refused military service on religious grounds, many of them were sent or chose to serve in the internment camps instead. They helped many college students find colleges away from the West coast that were willing to accept Japanese American students. My Dad went to Colby College in Maine which was founded by Baptists with a commitment to social justice, and whose students had an early involvement in the anti-slavery movement. I often imagine my father who was born and grew up in Sacramento arriving in Maine without a winter coat and never having seen snow.

My father loved Colby. He said when the president of the college, Franklin Winslow Johnson, received his application, they held an assembly with the entire student body and told them about how and why the Japanese Americans were being unjustly incarcerated and asked them if they would be willing to accept and welcome Japanese American students. They must have voted yes, because my father was accepted. Even in his later years, my father acknowledged that he received an excellent education at Colby. They taught him how to think critically and analytically. He said that their teaching style and methods influenced and impacted him as a professor of Greek and New Testament at the seminary at Virginia Union University, an historically black university in Richmond, Virginia, where he met the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and at the Episcopal seminary at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee which at that time was all-white and men-only.