Internment Camps

The WRA System

Assembly centers were initially established by the WRA as temporary facilities to assemble and organize evacuated residents before transporting them to relocation centers. Relocation centers were camps that were established outside established exclusion zones. The terms relocation centers and internment camps are often used interchangeably. The WRA also established a segregation center at Tule Lake, California, for evacuees identified as security risks and their families. Some also refer to relocation centers as detention camps or concentration camps.

Japanese Americans were incarcerated in nine internment camps and one segregation center. The first internment camp was established at Manzanar, California, and opened on March 21, 1942. The following internment camps were subsequently established in 1942: Poston (Colorado River), Arizona; Tule Lake, California; Gila River, Arizona; Minidoka, Idaho; Heart Mountain, Wyoming; Amache (Granada), Colorado; Topaz, Utah; Rohwer, Arkansas; and Jerome, Arkansas. In September 1943, the Tule Lake, California, internment camp was transformed into a camp for “dissenters” based on evacuees responses to a loyalty questionnaire. The first camp closed was Jerome, [Page 746][Page 747]Arkansas, on June 30, 1944, when all inmates were transferred to Rohwer, Arkansas, which was the last camp to be closed on November 30, 1945.

Schoolchildren at Manzanar. This 1943 photograph by Ansel Adams shows schoolchildren at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, California, one of ten camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Starting in the 1960s, many Sanseis (third-generation Japanese Americans, the children of Nisei) became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and began the “Redress Movement,” in an effort to obtain an apology and reparations from the federal government for the interment at Manzanar and elsewhere. In 1980, Congress established a commission to study the matter and finally in 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided redress of $20,000 for each surviving detainee.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppprs-00354.

Japanese Americans Fred Korematsu (left), Minoru Yasui (center), and Gordon Hirabayashi, at a press conference on January 19, 1983. During World War II, U.S. citizens of Japanese descent living on the West Coast were first ordered to submit to a curfew and then were relocated to desert internment camps under the provisions of Executive Order 9066. The order was based on a military report by Lt. Gen. J. L DeWitt stating that there was a danger of espionage by persons of Japanese ancestry. According to the report, all Japanese Americans should be evacuated from the West Coast “out of military necessity” because there was no way to determine which were dangerous. Korematsu, Yasui, and Hirabayashi refused to comply and challenged the constitutionality of the measures. The U.S. Supreme Court first upheld the curfew in 1943 in Hirabayashi v. United States (320 U.S. 81) and then the internment in 1944 in Korematsu v. United States (323 U.S. 214.) Forty years later, researchers discovered evidence that the Department of Justice had suppressed and altered portions of DeWitt's report at the time of the Supreme Court cases. These actions removed his racially biased statements against all people of Japanese ancestry and his acknowledgement that there was no known threat by these Japanese Americans.

Source: Bettmann/CORBIS.

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