Podcasts · History That Doesn't Suck

207: Japanese Internment: Removal, Relocation, & Reckoning

· 1 h 06 min

Episode 207: Japanese Internment: Removal, Relocation, & Reckoning

0:00 1:06:08

"What I vividly recall is after getting to Tanforan and walking into this horse stable, and Mom… putting down her suitcase and just crying.”

This is the story of Japanese American incarceration.

In February 1942, shortly after the United States enters the war, FDR signs Executive Order 9066, beginning the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their West Coast homes and lives. Some 120,000 civilians—many of them American citizens, none of them charged with a crime—are sent to camps across the American West and South. Their constitutional rights are denied in the name of national security.

Even as families struggle to carry on inside the barbed wire, legal challenges arise. Three Japanese Americans fight their way to the Supreme Court, forcing the nation’s highest court to confront a question it would rather avoid: can the Constitution be suspended for an entire ethnic group in wartime? And when the court finally rules—does the answer change anything at all?

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