Vote Against FDR in '44

[Luminous Animal]

22. 1942: President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066.

1942: In San Francisco Bay Area, members of Oakland Young Democratic Club write a statement condemning government’s decision to mass imprison Japanese Americans as an act of fascism in a war for democracy and send it to Bay Area newspapers, including Japanese American publications; the statement is never published.

Executive Order 9066 and its implementation of gulags in the U.S. is a dark period of U.S. history.


1942: Military police fire on protesters at Manzanar concentration camp, killing one young Japanese American.

1942: Two Issei (farmer Toshiro Kobata and fisherman Hirota Isomura) are shot to death by camp guards at the Lordsburg, New Mexico, enemy alien internment camp. The guards say the Issei were trying to escape; however, the two men upon their arrival were too ill to walk from the train station to the camp gate.

1942: University of Washington student Gordon Hirabayashi, with the support of American Friends Service Center, challenges constitutionality of U.S. government internment order and is sentenced to 90-day jail sentence for curfew violation; in 1943, U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rules against his challenge.

1942: Fred Korematsu arrested in San Leandro, California for defying government’s mass imprisonment order; in 1944, U.S. Supreme Court upholds Korematsu’s conviction but does not rule on constitutionality of internment.

1942: In Poston concentration camp, an attack on a man widely perceived to be an informer results in the arrest of two popular inmates. This incident soon escalates into a mass strike.

1942: In Los Angeles, Mexican American high school student Ralph Lazo joins his Japanese American friends in Manzanar concentration camp for two-and-a-half-years. Thirty years later, he joins the community movement for redress and reparations for Japanese Americans.

1942: In Manzanar concentration camp, the arrest of Harry Ueno triggers a mass uprising.

1943: In Tule Lake concentration camp, 35 men who refuse to fill out the “loyalty questions: are arrested.

1943: In Heart Mountain concentration camp, 75 Japanese American truck drivers walk out following a fist fight between their Japanese foreman and a white employee. The strike last four days.