University’s WWII film to be featured at commemoration event

The two organizations are producing the short film “One Small Stand” which will be featured at the Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Internment of Japanese Americans during World War II remembrance event in October 2017 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Concurrently, it will also be submitted to top film festivals around the world, followed by distribution on streaming services and on internet channels.

The film project is supported by seed donations, alumnae, and various educational and social-impact organizations. Additionally, an Internet crowdfunding campaign raised contributions on Kickstarter.

La Sierra film and television students will work alongside Hollywood film industry professionals to produce the short film. “One Small Stand” is directed by Rodney Vance, an acclaimed film director, award-winning television writer, and chair of La Sierra’s film and television department. His latest award-winning short film, “The Butterfly, the Harp and the Timepiece” starred Academy Award winner Melissa Leo and featured a soundtrack by Alex Geringas, a Grammy-winning composer. “One Small Stand” was written by La Sierra film student Jonathan Davidson who happened upon the story about Cossentine and his advocacy through a conversation with a faculty member. The film project emerged following several months of research and numerous drafts of the screenplay.

On a cool morning in 1942, five Japanese American students stood outside La Sierra College with packed bags as a bus wound slowly up the entrance road.

The campus community, led by La Sierra College President Erwin E. Cossentine, stood with them as the bus approached. The female students, Misao Gima, Sayo Hashizaki, Gertrude Yoshimoto, Toshiko and Sachiko Chinen, were considered a national security risk along with thousands of other U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry following the attacks on Pearl Harbor. On that spring day, the students boarded the bus headed to a processing center and then to the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in Wyoming where they were interned.

The students’ plight broke Cossentine’s heart. To keep his students in school, he had appealed tirelessly to the War Relocation Authority, the F.B.I, and the military to no avail. Yet Cossentine, a man known for his quiet strength and faith in God, wouldn’t back down. “I will get you out of the camps,” he promised his students as they left their college home that day.

“One Small Stand” highlights Cossentine’s efforts on behalf of not only La Sierra’s students, but also those at Pacific Union College and Loma Linda University, then called the College of Medical Evangelists.

“My grandfather was an amazing man. [He] was real man of faith. He was also very, very strong,” said Millie Jefferson, Cossentine’s granddaughter. Jefferson, who lives in Loma Linda with her husband, Sherman Jefferson, was only 2 years old when La Sierra’s Japanese American students were taken from the college, but she remembers well her family’s recounting of the event and of her grandfather’s tireless efforts to free the college students from the bleak and crowded camps.

“He just worked so hard to not have them go,” Jefferson said. “He knew it was unfair, but he had to obey [the law]. But he did it with deep, deep sorrow. Those were his students that God had given him to help.”

In 1983, La Sierra College dedicated E.E. Cossentine Hall in Cossentine’s honor. The building on the upper campus slope houses three amphitheaters and the World Museum of Natural History. An article about the building dedication in the college’s former Scope alumni magazine includes interviews with Cossentine, then 86 years old. He described the tearful campus worship service he led the morning the bus arrived for the students. All five were graduates of Hawaiian Mission Academy in Honolulu. 

“I was frustrated by the situation,” Cossentine said in the article. “I knew that the Japanese young people were not pro-Japanese. They were just students. They were Americans. But I had to convince the government of that.”

He added that he didn’t know if such injustices could occur again in America. “We do some strange things in war time. At that time, I just couldn’t pay too much attention to anyone. I was just concerned about the young people.”

Cossentine, the child of a farming couple in upstate New York, pursued a long career of educational and ministerial service in the Seventh-day Adventist denomination and its higher education institutions. He arrived at La Sierra in 1930 when it was called Southern California Junior College after serving as president of Avondale College of Higher Education in Australia. In 1942, he accepted the presidency of Union College in Lincoln, Neb., but continued his work to free the Adventist Japanese American students.

While in Nebraska he joined forces with other local college and university leaders to secure the approval of Lincoln town officials to allow the students to come out of the camps and study at local schools. After gaining permission from the Union College board to bring Japanese American Adventist college students to campus, and after finally securing permission from five government agencies to withdraw students from the camps, Cossentine traveled by train to Wyoming where found Japanese American citizens living in “tar paper shacks and the wind was blowing dust like nothing you ever see today,” he told Scope writer Richard Pershing. After speaking with the camp commander, he spread the word for all Adventist college students to meet him at the train depot. Around 25 students arrived.

Back in Nebraska, the town council had reversed its earlier decision to accept Japanese Americans into the city. Cossentine advised the college students upon arrival at Union College to avoid going into town in groups. At the college, he also asked the dining hall matron to seat the students interspersed among the other student diners to avoid drawing attention. 

In the Scope article, Ruth Cossentine Maschmeyer, Cossentine’s daughter and Millie Jefferson’s mother described the tension that permeated the days of war. “Everyone knew that if there would be an invasion, it would be on the West Coast. I remember the air raids, the blackouts, and the search lights combing the Los Angeles sky,” she said. 

Cossentine’s profound influence on La Sierra College was not confined to his efforts on behalf of Japanese American students. He is also credited with convincing the U.S. Navy to use a resort property in nearby Norco for its naval research base rather than acting on its eminent domain powers to take over the college.

For the university, Cossentine and the film about his influential efforts represents La Sierra’s long-held values of social justice and service to others. “It’s exciting to find this heritage, this evidence that we have lived those values in the past,” Davidson said.

“Every institution has stories that define its character,” stated La Sierra University President Randal Wisbey in a promotional video for “One Small Stand.” “This is one of those stories for La Sierra University.”