Aya Mariagnes Medrud wasn’t raised to be outspoken, but her voice burst forth when she was a teenager living in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.
It was the worst kind of discrimination, she believed, and she expressed herself in a string of letters to top American leaders, from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
“I was the oldest child,” said Medrud, 87, a Boulder activist and humanitarian who serves as honorary chair of the 12th Colorado Dragon Boat Festival.
That meant she had the burden of responsibility at a young age.
Her father was picked up by the FBI soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and spent most of the war in Justice Department prisons.
He told Aya, then 16, that she was responsible for taking care of her mother and two younger siblings at the
Her legendary voice — used over the decades to fight for women, children, and minorities — has now diminished to a whisper because of her battle with Parkinson’s disease.
But her determination has not wavered, and she fights daily to do what is needed, including serving as a role model in her position of honorary chair for this year’s , where she will appear at the opening ceremony at 10 a.m. Saturday.
“She is someone who faced the utter racism of internment, yet spent her career as an educator and social activist,” said Gil Asakawa, spokesman for the festival that was started in 2001 to celebrate Colorado’s Asian Pacific American communities.
Medrud taught art in the Boulder Valley School District for 20 years, and served in countless other positions, including as chairwoman of the Human Relations Commission for Boulder, where she did not hesitate to speak against racial profiling that she believed happened in the police department.
Her humanitarian work has been driven by her childhood experience, even when she was not aware of it. Soon after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, she met with a group of activists in Philadelphia who were talking about Middle Eastern men who had been picked up and incarcerated. Suddenly, she began to cry.
“After I got control of myself, I was able to tell them … (that) while we are concerned about the men and what happened to them, you have to also be concerned about the families that they have,” she said in a 2003 oral history interview archived at the Carnegie Library in Boulder.
“If they’re young men, they may have young families, wives who may not speak English, do not know how to access information or access help,” she said.
Her husband, Nelder “Med” Medrud, remembers that experience well.
She had suddenly been flooded with memories of her internment experience of 60 years earlier, he said, and “was insistent that they devote their energies toward the women and children, because that was her experience when her father was taken away, and she was left to take care of the family at 16.”
She’s known for founding the Boulder Asian Pacific Alliance, and for her work with such organizations as the Mile High chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League. But she’s also devoted much time to working with Native Americans, especially at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
But no matter where she served, her focus was single-minded.
“I’ve lived through incredible times,” she said in the 2003 interview. “We may think that we’re privileged today in this country, but think about the global aspect of what’s happening or what’s not happening for women and children in the global community.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083, coconnor@denverpost.com or twitter.com/coconnordp
