Forced Removal

After the Japanese military's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, America formally entered World War II, and newspapers, politicians, and military officials invented or exaggerated the threat of disloyalty by Japanese Americans. Groups including the California Farm Bureau and Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce called for the expulsion of Japanese American farmers. In February 1942, President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 authorized the military to forcibly remove more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, more than 60 percent of them U.S. citizens. El Cerrito's Japanese American growers were cultivating flowers for Easter and Mother's Day when, in April, the U.S. Government ordered them to report to a site in Berkeley for evacuation. They immediately had to find caretakers for their businesses and belongings or sell what they owned, and they were allowed to bring only what they could carry. Ultimately only one fourth of all Japanese Americans were able to regain their agricultural property, though local growers were more fortunate. Many Japanese Americans from the Bay Area were initially confined for a few months in the horse stalls at the Tanforan Racetrack, where for some the animal odors were almost unbearable. In 1944, in Korematsu v. U.S., the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the forced removal of Japanese Americans, though three justices dissented, finding the action a violation of constitutional rights. In the 1980s, researchers uncovered evidence that U.S. government officials had concealed and manipulated evidence before the U.S. Supreme Court and had knowingly presented false information to justify the mass removal of the Japanese American community. In 1988, the U.S. government acknowledged that forced removal was not a military necessity, apologized, and agreed to reparations. The convictions of Fred Korematsu for defying the internment orders and Gordon Hirabayashi for violating a government curfew and for failing to register for internment during wartime were also overturned on grounds of official misconduct, but the court rulings that supported the U.S. government's actions toward Japanese American communities still stand as precedent.

El Cerrito, California · United States