via: Rebel History February 19, 2022 80 years ago today in 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This executive order led to the mass internment of Japanese-American citizens in ten camps spread out across the American countryside west of the Mississippi River, most infamously the Manzanar and Tule Lake camps in California. This executive order was passed in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941 and allowed for the removal of any and all Japanese-American citizens from their homes and their property confiscated. The text of the order itself did not actually single out Japanese-American citizens specifically, but instead delegated the authority to do so to the Secretary of War. Who did indeed single out the entire West Coast as a military zone and subsequently had 110,000 Japanese-American citizens forcibly removed from their homes and businesses and shipped to these ten camps: Manzanar, Tule Lake, Minidonka, Heart Mountain, Topaz, Gila River, Poston, Granada, Jerome and Rohwer. This internment proved later to be a massive violation of the rights of a group of American citizens based on war hysteria. Aside from the removal of these citizens from their homes, civil rights violations within the camps were rampant. In addition to stories of occasional abuse from military personnel, there were also major riots at times. The most famous of these was the Manzanar Riot of December 1942, when the leader of the Kitchen Workers’ Union was arrested for exposing the creation of artificial shortages of meat and sugar by camp administrators, who had been stealing these food rations and selling them on the black market. Several thousand internees marched in protest of his arrest, and were attacked as a result by military police with tear gas. Two marchers were also fatally shot in the confrontation. In December of 1944, Major General Henry C. Pratt issued Public Proclamation No. 21, which stated that all internees were free to return to their former lives, which in most cases either no longer existed or would never be the same as of January of 1945. Only ten U.S citizens were arrested as Japanese informants throughout all of World War Two, and not a single one was Japanese. Eventually, an investigation by the Carter administration concluded that the internment of these citizens was unwarranted, and Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Rights Act of 1988, which paid twenty thousand US dollars to each surviving internee and issued a public apology from the federal government. [Online References] (https://www.history.com/.../roosevelt-signs-executive...) (https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=74 ) (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5154 ) Authored by DK