The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, precipitated the entrance of the United States into World War II; it also began a series of events that resulted in 120,000 Japanese Americans being interned in camps operated by the War Relocation Authority. Soon after the bombing, more than two thousand men suspected of espionage or sabotage—“enemy aliens,” as these Japanese Americans were called—were arrested by the FBI. Within a few months, fear that Japanese Americans’ loyalty lay with Japan increased, stoked by comments such as that of Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense Command, who said, “The Japanese race is an enemy race, and racial affinities are not severed by migration.” Early in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the war department to designate military areas from which “any and all persons may be excluded.”

After the war, most of these interned citizens returned to their homes, having suffered financial losses, disruption of education and careers, and deep psychological wounds. Court cases questioning the constitutionality of the relocation camps reached as high as the Supreme Court. In Korematsu v. United States, the Court did not rule the action unconstitutional but did issue the precedent-setting statement that “all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect… . Courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny.”

Ultimately, it was in 1988, with the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, that Congress authorized a presidential apology to Japanese Americans. The act acknowledges that “a grave injustice was done to both citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry” and that “…these actions were carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage documented…and were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” In compensation for the “enormous damages, both material and intangible,” the act also provided for payment of $20,000 in reparations for each surviving internee.

Many argue that the case of Japanese Americans sets a precedent and that other groups who have suffered unjust treatment, such as African Americans, also deserve reparations. The texts in this Conversation will acquaint you with the circumstances and viewpoints surrounding the Japanese internment, will present several arguments both for and against reparations for African Americans, and will ask you to explore whether it is possible to right the wrongs of the past and whether providing financial compensation to wronged individuals or institutions is an appropriate and effective way to do so.

Sources

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Executive Order No. 9066 (1942)

Western Defense Command, Evacuation Order (1942)

Dorothea Lange, I Am an American (1942)

Julie Otsuka, from When the Emperor Was Divine (2002)

George H. W. Bush, Letter of Apology (1991)

Eric K. Yamamoto, from Racial Reparations: Japanese American Redress and African American Claims (1998)

Brent Staples, The Slave Reparations Movement Adopts the Rhetoric of Victimhood (2001)

Charles Ogletree Jr., Litigating the Legacy of Slavery (2002)

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ending the Slavery Blame-Game (2010)