Leo Goto was 9 years old when he and five of his siblings joined his parents in a pickup truck, and drove over Loveland Pass from California to live with aunts and uncles already in southeastern Colorado. It was February, 1942 and Colorado authorities stopped the truck at the top of the pass, asked dozens of questions and offered numerous skeptical looks before allowing the family to continue. Nine miles and thousands of feet down in elevation in Georgetown, the Goto family realized it had left a family member atop the pass. That’s how nervous American families of Japanese descent were at that time.

Many children of Asian descent wore sandwich boards around their necks proclaiming “I’m not Japanese” to ward off any potential troubles with authorities or, more likely, neighborhood vigilantes.

The tensions facing other Americans were equally real. The country had never been attacked before and the manner in which the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor left a country physically bruised and emotionally shaken. Polls taken during that time period showed a country more than twice as likely to distrust a person of Japanese descent than an individual of German or Italian descent.

When it came to cohabitating with people of Japanese descent, Wyoming Gov. Nels Smith said, “if you send them to (Wyoming), they’ll be hanging from every pine tree.” The Idaho Attorney General said, “(Idaho) is white man’s country and we want to keep it that way.” One Colorado town threatened violence.

The headlines through the summer of 1942 showed pain, loss and death. Japan was winning the war and those whose faces looked similar to those dispersing pain so readily in the Far East was too much for many people to handle.

Yet, Ralph Carr told the public "if you harm them, you must harm me first."

When California Attorney General Earl Warren argued anyone with any Japanese blood should be placed under armed guard without evidence of wrongdoing, Carr said "an American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen."

When The Denver Post clamored for the immediate internment of any non-citizen Japanese in Colorado, Carr decided to "offer the hand of friendship, secure in the knowledge that they will be as truly American as the rest of us."

As a result, Ralph Carr was bounced from office.