Linda Toyota, director of the Texas Diversity Council, Gulf Coast chapter, draws her passion for diversity from her own family’s history.
“I learned how to face and work through adversity to make things better, mainly through my parents experience during World War II,” Toyota divulges. “As U.S. citizens, they and their families, along with more than 100,000 other Japanese Americans, were removed from their homes and unjustly incarcerated, without due process, and placed in internment camps.”
Toyota continues, “When an all-Japanese American U.S. Army was formed, my father, his brothers and my mother’s brother enlisted to show their loyalty to the United States even though the country had turned its back on them and denied them their basic rights.”
Today, Toyota credits her success and commitment to diversity and inclusion initiatives to “being open to different ways of looking at situations, and working with diverse people whose culture, beliefs, and experiences are different.” –zondra hughes
