Born: 21 December 1919, United States
Died: 11 September 2003
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Rachel Elizabeth Reese
The following is republished from the Densho Encyclopedia, in line with the Creative Commons licensing. It was written by Brian Niiya.
Anthropologist, briefly community analyst at Jerome.
Rachel Elizabeth Reese was born on Dec. 21, 1918, in Des Moines, Iowa. Her father, Curtis W. Reese, a Unitarian minister, soon moved the family to Chicago where he became secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference and later gained fame as a founder of religious humanism and the dean of the Abraham Lincoln Centre, a settlement house founded in 1905 that was open to people of all races and religions. Exposed to many cultures growing up, Reese became an anthropologist, graduating from the University of Chicago with AB (1939) and AM (1941) degrees, doing fieldwork in Guatamala, Mexico, and the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin. While in Mexico, she met Emil Sady, an Arab American from Los Angeles, and the couple married. During World War II, Emil served in the navy, while Rachel, still a graduate student, took a position with the War Relocation Authority ‘s Community Analysis Section (CAS). Hired by CAS head Edward Spicer to work in the Washington, DC, office (along with another woman anthropologist, Katharine Luomala), she was later dispatched to Jerome, Arkansas, from April 1 to June 23, 1944, where she covered the closing of Jerome. A prior community analyst, Edgar C. McVoy, had been at Jerome for the second half of 1943, but there had been no analyst there since November. Sady was one of just three community analysts who was still a graduate student (the others were David H. French and John E. de Young).
After the war, Sady became a research analyst for President Harry S. Truman ‘s Committee on Civil Rights and contributed to its final report, To Secure These Rights. She subsequently worked for the Japanese American Citizens League ‘s Anti-Discrimination Committee as a researcher working on issues of naturalization. She also completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1947, writing a dissertation based on her work at Jerome. The couple lived in Maryland while Emil worked for the Interior and State Departments and later moved to New York, where he worked for the United Nations. With three sons by 1953, Rachel stayed home with them, while also developing curricular material for high schools. One such project was a 1970 multimedia unit titled “Japanese American Relocation,” distributed by Educational Audio Visual in Pleasantville, New York. After Emil’s death in 1974, she taught anthropology at Pace University and Mercy College, where in the 1980s she developed a course titled “Japanese American Wartime Experience.” She emerged as a vocal defender of the CAS/WRA legacy later in life, testifying at the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) Chicago hearing in 1981 and writing an essay on the CAS in reaction to a revisionist assessment by Orin Starn in American Ethnologist in 1987. She passed away in Arizona in 2003.