Citizenship, Civil Rights & Japanese Internment

Tough Terms

• Alien

• Nativism

• Xenophobia

• Issei

• NiseiNisei soldier World War II era

Historical Background• Aliens or Immigrants

• Asian Immigration & American Nativism (1870s-1920s)

• Legacies of Anti-Asian Sentiment

Harper’s Weekly illustration from 1870s

was critical of anti-Chinese sentiment.

WWII & Japanese Internment • Nativism by the Bombs’ Early Light

• FDR & Executive Order 9066

• Camp Life

Illustration and Writing Project• Individual Creative Writing

• Small Group Discussion

• Large Group Discussion of Illustrations

Image 1

Wanto Grocery, owned by an Asian American, UC Berkeley graduate. (California, December 1941)

Image 2

Reading evacuation orders on a bulletin board in Los Angeles. These families will have as little as one week to report to the relocation center. (1942) Library of Congress.

Image 3

Dorothea Lange, “One Nation Indivisible.” Pledge of Allegiance at Rafael Weill Elementary School a few weeks prior to evacuation. (San Francisco, 1942)

Image 4

Japanese Americans register for internment at the Santa Anita reception center in Los Angeles. (1942) Library of Congress

Image 5

Evacuees waiting with their luggage at the old train station in Los Angeles, CA. The train will take them to Owens Valley. (April 1942) Library of Congress

Image 6

Japanese Americans waiting to board the train that will take them to the internment camp in Owens Valley. (April 1942)

Image 7

“All Packed Up and Ready to Go” Editorial Cartoon, San Francisco News (March 6, 1942)

Image 8

Family arriving in internment camp barracks, from the Tacoma New Tribune, University of Washington. (no date)

Image 9

An American Soldier on guard duty at an internment camp holds a Japanese American child. Tacoma News Tribune, University of Washington.

Image 10

Internment camp mess hall. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, University of Washington.

Image 11

Byron, Takashi Tsuzuki, Forced Removal, Act II, 1944. Japanese American National Museum Collection.

Image 12

G.S. Hante, a barber in Kent, Washington, displays his sentiments about internment. (March 1944)

The Rest of the Story• Confiscation and Property Loss

• Korematsu v. United States (1944)

• Apology & Reparations

George H. W. Bush’s apology to Japanese Americans held in the

internment camps. (1988)