On December 18, 1944, three years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed an executive order that enabled government officials to deport more than 100,000 Americans to “concentration camps.” None of these citizens had been accused of a real crime. All of them were torn from their homes, jobs, schools, and communities, and deposited in tawdry, makeshift housing behind barbed wire, solely for the crime of being of Japanese descent.
In 1944 the US Supreme Court ruled, in Korematsu v. United States, that the forcible deportation and detention of Japanese Americans on the basis of race was a “military necessity.” Today it is widely considered one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. But Korematsu was not an isolated event. In fact, the Court’s racist ruling was the result of a deep-seated anti-Japanese, anti-Asian sentiment running all the way back to the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s.…Learn more about this disturbing period of American history inside the pages of this fascinating nonfiction book.