Search Results - Opler, Morris Edward, 1907-

Morris Edward Opler

Morris Edward Opler (May 16, 1907 – May 13, 1996) was an American anthropologist and advocate of Japanese-American civil rights. He was born in Buffalo, New York and was the older brother of Marvin Opler, an anthropologist and social psychiatrist.

Opler's chief anthropological contribution was in the ethnography of Southern Athabaskan peoples, i.e. the Navajo and Apache, such as the Chiricahua, Mescalero, Lipan, and Jicarilla. His classic work is ''An Apache Life-Way'' (1941). He worked with Grenville Goodwin, who was also studying social organization among the Western Apache. Following Goodwin's death, Opler edited a volume of his letters from the field and other papers and published the collection in 1973.

Opler earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1933. He taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California, during the 1940s. Later, he taught at Cornell University and the University of Oklahoma.

During World War II, Opler worked as a community analyst at the Manzanar concentration camp, documenting conditions in the camp and the daily lives of its Japanese-American inmates. Arriving in 1943, he was sympathetic toward the displaced Japanese Americans and frequently butted heads with camp administrators. He covered the so-called "Manzanar Riot," resistance to the unpopular "loyalty questionnaire," and conscription of men from the camp.

He also aided the defense of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu in their unsuccessful cases challenging the legality of the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Opler wrote an ''amicus'' brief for each case that argued the military necessity cited by Western Defense Command head John L. DeWitt was in fact, based "on racial grounds."

In his published works, he challenged the way American public schools taught about Japanese Americans, and fought to improve the way they were viewed by Americans. Provided by Wikipedia