Walt and Milly Woodward
Bainbridge Island newspaper publishers and editors who were among the few who opposed incarceration. Walt Woodward (1910–2001) and Mildred Logg "Milly" Woodward (1909–89) were the owners and publishers of the Bainbridge Review , a small town newspaper that covered the Bainbridge Island, Washington, community, from 1940 to 1988. In that capacity, they were among the few editors who were outspoken in opposing the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans and in supporting Japanese Americans from Bainbridge forcibly removed to Manzanar and Minidoka . Throughout the war, the Woodwards also engaged Nisei from Bainbridge to write regular dispatches to the Review from the concentration camps so that Japanese Americans would continue to be seen as a part of the local community and to pave the way for their postwar return. The Woodwards kept their editorial stance despite some local opposition and subscription cancelations. Their World War II stance in defense of civil rights has been much honored in recent decades, most notably through the naming of Bainbridge Island's middle school in their honor in 1994. In 2015, the Kitsap Regional Library made digitized copies of the World War II era issues of Bainbridge Review available online.
For More Information
Bainbridge Review digital collection, Kitsap Regional Library.
Bearing the Unbearable . Produced and directed by Rory Banyard for North Shore Productions and the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, 2019. 29 minutes. [On the incarceration of Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island, Washington.]
Elfendahl, Gerald W. " Remembering Walter Woodward (1910–2001). " Historylink.org .
Siegel, Shizue. In Good Conscience: Supporting Japanese Americans During the Internment . San Mateo, Calif.: AACP, Inc., 2006.
Walt Woodward visual history, May 11, 1998 . Interviewed by Donna Harui and Mij Woodward. Densho Digital Repository.
" Walt and Milly Woodward ." Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community Website. [Includes oral history excerpts and photographs.]
Woodward, Mary. In Defense of Our Neighbors: The Walt and Milly Woodward Story. Foreword by David Guterson. Bainbridge Island, WA: Fenwick Publishing, 2008.
Woodward Middle School website, http://www.bisd303.org/Domain/9 .
Last updated Sept. 5, 2024, 9:18 p.m..