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Showing posts with the label internment camps

Day of Remembrance--Japanese American WWII Internment

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  Japanese Americans travel between housing barracks with Heart Mountain on the horizon.  Public Domain, Department of the Interior. War Relocation Authority. Day of Remembrance February 19, 2022, marked 80 years of racial reckoning since the signing of Executive Order 9066 that led to the wrongful incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. On that date in 1942, community leaders were imprisoned without arrest or trial. Families, the majority of them naturalized or US born citizens, were moved to relocation centers before final settlement in ten internment camps throughout the United States. From November, 1942, until early 1945, Heart Mountain Internment Center housed approximately 10,000 people on a bleak high plain in Wyoming. That treeless plain suffers the extremes of weather--hot in the summer and buffeted by wind, snow and cold in winter. When the camp was abandoned in 1945, it was the property of the U S government. Homesteading was encouraged and people f