Manzanar

On 19 February 1942 President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorising the removal of any person from designated military areas. Over the following months about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast - roughly two-thirds of them American citizens, the rest long-settled immigrants barred by law from naturalising - were ordered from their homes with what they could carry. They had days to dispose of farms, businesses and houses, and most lost them.

Manzanar, in the Owens Valley between the Sierra Nevada and Death Valley, held more than 10,000 people at its peak. Families lived in tar-paper barracks partitioned into single rooms, used communal latrines without partitions, and were watched from eight guard towers by military police with machine guns. Dust came through the walls in summer; the winters were freezing. People built gardens, schools, a newspaper and a hospital inside the fence. In December 1942 military police fired on a crowd protesting an arrest, killing two young men.

No one incarcerated at Manzanar was charged with anything. In 1944 the Supreme Court upheld the removal in Korematsu v. United States, a decision it finally repudiated in 2018. A federal commission concluded in 1983 that the incarceration had been caused by race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership, not military necessity, and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 issued a formal apology and $20,000 to each surviving incarceree. The land itself had been taken twice: from Owens Valley Paiute people, and then from farmers whose water Los Angeles had bought out.