Lawndale Tribune
AND lAwNDAle News
The Weekly Newspaper of Lawndale
Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 79, No. 35 - August 27, 2020
Scholarship Award Goes to One of Our Warriors
Congratulations to El Camino College sophomore and softball player Mina Nakawake. She was named a recipient of the South Coast Conference’s Don Mackenzie Scholarship Award for 2019-20! The Warriors’ standout becomes the fourth student-athlete from ECC to earn
the award since its inception in 2007. Read her story: https://bit.ly/2Em76N9. Photo courtesy El Camino College.
Japanese Farmers in El Segundo
By Dr. Don Brann
In the mid-1920s, there were immigrants
from Japan living and working in El Segundo.
They farmed the land in the agrarian sector
and didn’t venture west of PCH (first Arizona,
then Sepulveda) into El Segundo.
There is a false story in El Segundo that
has been circulated for decades. It’s about the
Japanese and their impact on the boundary line
between the El Segundo school district and the
Wiseburn school district. The boundary line
is and has always been PCH, never Aviation,
the City’s eastern boundary.
The story that goes around El Segundo is
that the school boundary was established at
PCH to prevent Japanese students from attending
El Segundo schools. The Japanese resided
east of PCH near El Segundo Blvd. So, these
children went to the Wiseburn School that
served families living east of PCH.
Here’s what’s wrong with that tale: the
district boundary was set in 1911, but the
first Japanese student enrolled in Wiseburn in
1924. Case closed!
Japanese people were not popular in
America in the first half of the 20th Century,
even less so in late 1941 after the Pearl Harbor
bombing. In 1942, they were taken away and
placed in rural internment camps across the
U. S. But, the story that these students were
deliberately prevented from El Segundo
schools by establishing the boundary,
where it remains today, is not true. That line
was determined in 1911, many years before the
Japanese arrived at a truck farm in El Segundo.
When the Japanese were finally released from
the camps, many of them settled in Gardena,
Lomita, Torrance and Palos Verdes. They
annually met for decades to celebrate their
positive experiences in “Western Hawthorne.”
So, why is the eastern El Segundo school
boundary (PCH) different than the eastern El
Segundo City boundary? When the El Segundo
Land Improvement Company laid out the town,
they placed the east boundary at Aviation.
They limited the residential section to stop at
PCH on the east. More than 20 years before
El Segundo was incorporated as a City, the
Wiseburn School District began in 1896 and
went west to the Pacific Ocean. So, when El
Segundo annexed land to begin its own school
district, it was only interested in setting the east
line at PCH since no residential uses would
be east of there. Also, without any families
to serve, the County ruled that the Wiseburn
western boundary would be shifted from the
beach to PCH. When El Segundo schools
appealed the boundary to Los Angeles County
in the early 1930s, the County rejected their
arguments. Who knew the eastern portion of
El Segundo would eventually develop into the
aerospace capital of the world? •
ABC Doc
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