Mr. Meade Research Paper

As the ball hits the tennis surface at Rowley Park in Gardenia, California, Mr. Meade is finishing up his tennis lesson with his only daughter as his wife looks on from the sidelines. It is a beautiful fall breezy dusk evening on 132nd Street in Gardena, California. The Meade family enjoying their tennis outing preparing to pack up and head home for the night. Looking at this family, you would never know that life for Mr. Meade has not always been so carefree. Through years of hard work, continuous education and seizing every opportunities placed before him, he was able to prosper and assimilate almost seamlessly into the American fabric of the Los Angeles landscape. His life and experiences for the most part were ethnically and racially blind with only distant brushes with racial tension. William Meada was an example of the Hawaiian Japanese Americans that prospered and assimilated well into the fabric of America despite the racial and ethnic tension of Los Angeles’s history and maybe even because of it.
Born on the island of Oahu in the town of Moiliili, with the Hawaiian “locals” custom of “never trying to be too flashy or fancy” as Mr. Meada put it, ingrained into his persona. Mr. Meada was driven to be somebody. He did all the right things and was at the right places, at the right times. He and

Even after the discrimination laws were ruled illegal, they were kept in force by white bigots and local municipalities. “…job and housing markets, the beaches, eateries, hotels and public amusements were not equally accessible to racial-minority people in Southern California. Exclusionary practices often mirrored patterns of residential segregation….Asian Americans were excluded from many public golf courses and swimming pools.” (Matsumoto 24) But unlike Bill and his family, many American Japanese began to