He smiled, recalling for the UMSL crowd the moment he met Martin Luther King Jr. “Our democracy is existentially dependent on people who cherish those ideals.”Īs an adult, Takei became increasingly active in social justice efforts, including the civil rights movement. “The ideals are noble, but people are also fallible human beings, and they make terrible mistakes,” Takei said during the Nov. For Takei it was a metaphor for human harmony, the epitome of “diversity coming together and working in concert,” he said.īut even as Takei relished his growing career and the American democracy, he was learning through life experience and from his father that his country’s ideals and realities didn’t always line up.ĭuring his talk at UMSL last week, George Takei took the audience on a sobering journey – not into the 23rd century aboard the USS Enterprise but rather back in time to the early 1940s, when he was imprisoned at age 5 during the internment of Japanese Americans. Living through that period, which Takei called “one of the darkest chapters in American history,” made working with Gene Roddenberry and the cast of the Star Trek project two decades later seem, by contrast, a kind of utopia. There were the sentry towers, the barbed-wire fences – and the wrenching irony of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with the words “with liberty and justice for all” while surrounded by such reminders of confinement. Roosevelt to live in imprisonment until the end of the conflict three years later.ĭuring the internment, other troubling scenes and images would come to stick with Takei as well, he told the audience of UMSL students and community members. “I will never be able to forget that scene – it’s seared into my memory,” said Takei, who along with his parents, siblings and roughly 120,000 fellow Japanese Americans was forced at the command of President Franklin D. Touhill Performing Arts Center, George Takei shared his own journey – and his hopes and fears for a country he loves.
Speaking to UMSL students and community members at the Blanche M.
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