A few years ago, I purchased a 1944 School Ma’am in a local antique store and was astounded to find inside two photographs of an Asian American Madison College student named Yuri Nemoto. A quick search of The Breeze turned up a brief 1943 interview that refers to her as the “first” student “of Japanese descent,” which means she is likely the first Asian American. Nemoto told the reporter, an unidentified fellow classmate, that she was from Los Angeles, had come to Virginia on a scholarship to Lynchburg College, and transferred to Madison that fall intending to study dietetics. Well. I had so many questions after reading that. How had she not been sent to a detention camp along with more than 110,000 to 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry? What had it been like for her to be a Japanese American attending a whites-only Southern school during World War II? My research revealed a compelling story of resistance and resilience.