re: Petition seeks to rename Roosevelt Island, calls FDR ‘racist’

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/rise-to-world-power/us-wwii/a/japanese-internment

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Overview

President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 resulted in the relocation of 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast into internment camps during the Second World War.

Japanese Americans sold their businesses and houses for a fraction of their value before being sent to the camps. In the process, they lost their livelihoods and much of their lifesavings.

In Korematsu v. United States (1944) the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of internment. In 1988, the United States issued an official apology for internment and compensated survivors.

Executive Order 9066

In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the Secretary of War to declare certain areas within the United State as military zones, and to restrict access to those areas on the grounds of wartime military necessity. The president’s order came less than three months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, amid concerns that Japanese American citizens might pose a threat to national security. These concerns were driven by public hysteria grounded in racism and false reports of sabotage and collaboration with the enemy.

Under the Executive Order, some 112,000 Japanese Americans—79,000 of whom were American citizens—were removed from the West Coast and placed into ten internment camps located in remote areas. Japanese Americans were given only a few days' notice to report for internment, and many had to sell their homes and businesses for much less than they were worth. In so doing, they lost much of what they had accrued in the course of their lives.

The camps—like the one at Manzanar, California, located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains—were surrounded by fences, barbed wire, guard towers, searchlights and machine guns. Families incarcerated in the camps lived in uninsulated cabins or converted stables. They occupied their enforced idleness by organizing schools and camp newspapers, by running barber or beauty shops, and more. A small number were cleared for work outside the camps.

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