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77 years ago, FDR signed #EO9066, which authorized the incarceration of 120k Americans of Japanese ancestry in “relocation camps” in the West & Arkansas. #DayOfRemembrance 
Race baiting flyers like this one from Theodore Geisel - the one & only Dr. Seuss - helped lead to the uprooting of Americans simply because their ethnicity made them suspicious. #DayOfRemembrance
Many Japanese Americans had less than 48 hours to pack what they could, & sell the rest of their possessions to neighbors who gladly only paid them 25¢ on the dollar - if that. What would you have packed? Or sold without knowing what the future held?
Some families were sansei - the 3rd generation in the US. Most families were headed by naturalized immigrants, with nisei (2nd gen) children. Americans. Yet this is the hate they faced after 7 December 1941. #DayOfRemembrance
Welcome to Manzanar, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, future home to 10,000 Japanese Americans. The armed soldiers were, needless to say, not for the Japanese Americans’ protection. #DayOfRemembrance
In case anyone could ever claim that Americans could/would never make members of an ethnic group wear distinctive symbols, or tags as if they were no more valuable than luggage. #DayOfRemembrance
The inward facing guard towers, some with .30 caliber machine guns, were a lovely design feature at each of the War Relocation Authority’s 10 camps. #DayOfRemembrance
The barracks at Manzanar were made of flimsy wood & weren’t insulated against the cold. Families had no privacy, as they only had a sheet to separate their area from another family’s. #DayOfRemembrance
The Heart Mountain Camp in Wyoming would eventually house 8,000 Americans. #DayOfRemembrance
Upon your arrival, or soon thereafter, you would be asked to fill out this loyalty questionnaire. How would you respond if the government that demanded loyalty from you just stripped away your life & that of your family? #DayOfRemembrance encyclopedia.densho.org/Loyalty_questi…
To add insult to injury, not only did that same government uproot you, but it also wanted you to potentially die for it, as this call for volunteers shows. the442.org/volunteers.html #DayOfRemembrance
12,000 men & women answered their Marion’s call to arms despite all of this. Most of the men were eventually assigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in US Army history.
Still others signed up as interpreters with the Military Intelligence Service. One even was assigned as a B-24 gunner in Europe, then later on B-29s in the Pacific. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Kuroki
#DayOfRemembrance
#DayOfRemembrance
These people - these Americans - all had to rebuild their lives after the war. They continued to face the same discrimination that caused their incarceration in the first place. Nevertheless, they persisted. #DayOfRemembrance
History may not repeat itself, necessarily, but it does rhyme. FDR’s successor wanted to ban outright the immigration of one group simply based on their religion. He & his übermensch Miller would like to stop Latinos from ever becoming Americans. #DayOfRemembrance
If we’ve learned anything at all in the 77 years since FDR signed that order, it should be that the ostracism of a swath of Americans, simply based on racial antipathy, runs counter to the promise that is America. #DayOfRemembrance
We are better than this, as a country & as a people. Yet this is the America some want to make great again. #NeverAgain. Not while I draw breath. Not with my non-white children’s futures at stake. #DayOfRemembrance
Here endeth the lesson.
