Identity.

So my mission in life has been to educate Americans about Americans, both its glory and its failure.

And I can still be sending that same message long after I'm in the galaxies.

At Janem, we've always had the benefit of having our docents, many of whom were survivors of the incarceration themselves.

And it was an extraordinary ability for them to be able to talk to people to talk to audiences from the first hand perspective and be able to tell their own stories.

As that generation is passing, it was this incredible opportunity to be able to use this technology to preserve the opportunity to have conversations with them and for people to engage with them in a very real way.

So today was the unveiling of five story files, which is new technology, AI-based technology that conserves the ability to have engaging conversations with people.

We've previewed four of them today.

One with George Decay, which is an amazing opportunity for people to engage with him about his life, about his history while he was incarcerated as a child, what the impact of the incarceration was on him, his life as the civil rights icon and defender of democracy, and also to ask questions about what the impact of that is today.

Human storytelling is really, since we've been cavemen's the way that we tell, hey, don't go in the bushes over there, don't eat those berries, don't go in the trees, that's dangerous.

It's the way societally we can grow beyond an individual human lifespan.

So we're sort of hijacking that human innate storytelling and listening call and response and using it to preserve in Amber the real authentic original storytelling.

So it's hard to tell if this has been eight years in the making or if this has been three lifetimes.

Um my grandmother was the first volunteer here at the museum.

My mother then raised money for their very first tape recorder, and they used that tape recorder to capture all histories, and so this has sort of been three generations in the making and eight years of wanting to take the gift that my grandmother, her friends, and all the people we spoke to today have given back to American society, telling the stories of wrongs that have happened to them in American history so that they do not happen again.

One injustice after another.

When we were in prison, Roosevelt, my father said was a president that he respected back in the 30s when the nation was in a deep depression, high unemployment, people had given up, and he said to the people of America, there's nothing to fear but fear itself, and this galvanized the people and brought the country up.

And then when the bombing of Pearl Harbor happened, everybody went crazy, and we have to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor, and he saw us as the enemy, and as great a man as Roosevelt was, Roosevelt was a human being.

He got swept up in the hysteria.

There are people on the West Coast that look exactly like the people that bomb Bar.

Who knows what could be a spy?

They might be planning to bomb San Pedro.

After a year of that unjust imprisonment, the government realizes there's a wartime manpower shortage, and here are all these young people, men and women, that they've categorized just arbitrarily as enemy aliens.

We're Americans, born, raised, and imprisoned by America, born here.

They just made up this enemy alien thing, but now they need us.

So they come down with a loyalty questionnaire.

What's the matter with this government?

They should have asked that before they imprisoned us, before they took our homes, destroyed my father's business.

Young few people today, hearing this story.

I keep telling people the ideals of democracy are noble.

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

That's us, the people.

And my father said, we have to be involved, all of us.

At that time, the civil rights movement was going on.

He said, what the black people are doing is that they are out speaking up for themselves.

They have a history.

That's a part of American history.

And you said you when you get the vote, you are the part of the people that speak for this country.

We have to participate.

I am so grateful to be sitting here with Hina Knowles to have a chance to hear a little bit more about your work and the creation of the Waco Theater Center.

The creation of the Waco Theater Center has been a dream of mine since I was a teenager because I had a mentor actually gave me exposure to the arts.

And it made me feel seen and heard.

So I know the effect of the arts on the community and especially on kids who don't have great opportunities.

And that is what Waco is all about.

We started this charity very small in a little tiny 100 seat theater.

And the challenge was that our students that we mentor, we had to bust them, so we spent all our money on busing them to North Hollywood.

And so this is a dream come true because we're in that community.

We can do community programs.

How cool is that?

I came out here to go to one of the shops on the main street here, which I thought was amazing because it was all these black owned artistic businesses.

So that was exciting within itself.

And then my friend Mark Bradford brought me here.

And of course, it was before all the renovations, and I was like, oh my God, this is just sitting here.

Are you kidding me?

It looked completely different.

And so when I heard that it was being restored, it was music to my ears.

And when there was an opportunity for us to help manage this place, it was like a dream come true.

And for it to be a place where this community can easily access.

And so that's what we're hoping for this place.

We're praying that it is a cultural community center, which it was meant to be in the first place.