Dear Miss Breed

"Dear Miss Breed..." the letters begin. Clara Estelle Breed was the children's librarian at the San Diego Public Library from 1929 to 1945. When her young Japanese American patrons and their families were forced into relocation camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942, Miss Breed became their penpal and their lifeline, sending them books and supplies, assisting with various requests, and "serving as a reminder of the possibility for decency and justice in a troubled world."
Fifty years later, Miss Breed passed on her collection of letters to Elizabeth Kikuchi Yamada, one of her original correspondents. Ms. Yamada donated them to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. The online collection includes digital facsimiles of the correspondence, full transcriptions of the letters, and brief biographies of most of the correspondents. The site also includes home movies and oral histories.