"AN INDEPENDENT COMMITTEE OF INFLUENTIAL INDIVIDUALS"
"The Fair Play Committee was established in the fall of 1941, three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In May of that year, David Prescott Barrows, chairman of the University of California's Political Science Department and former university president, became concerned about rising anti-Japanese sentiment in California. He discussed the matter with Galen Fisher, a faculty member at the Pacific School of Religion and a political science research associate at the university. A liberal Protestant, Fisher had served twenty-one years in Japan as secretary of the International Committee of the YMCA.
Subsequently, he had carried out a survey of race relations on the Pacific Coast for the Rockefeller Institute of Social and Religious Research. Although Fisher was in his late sixties in 1941, he agreed to take on the task of organizing what he and Barrows envisioned as "an independent committee of influential individuals" to advocate for the protection of the civil rights and liberties of Californians of Japanese descent. In September 1941, he announced the establishment of the Northern California Committee on Fair Play for Citizens and Aliens of Japanese Ancestry. (5) "