Manzanar

In the desert of California's Owens Valley, more than 10,000 Japanese Americans — the majority of them U.S. citizens — were imprisoned behind barbed wire and guard towers for no crime but their ancestry. Manzanar, the first and most infamous of ten War Relocation Authority camps, stands as a permanent reminder of what wartime fear and racial prejudice did to the Constitution's promises. It is preserved not to honor a triumph but to ensure the nation reckons honestly with one of its gravest violations of civil liberties.

Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, authorizing the forced removal of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. Manzanar, a former town site in the Owens Valley, opened in March 1942 as the first of the camps, eventually confining over 10,000 people, two-thirds of them American citizens, in tar-paper barracks behind barbed wire.

Families endured cramped barracks, communal latrines, extreme desert temperatures, and armed guards in towers aimed inward at the incarcerated population. Despite these conditions, residents built schools, gardens, a newspaper, and community organizations, and young men from Manzanar and other camps volunteered for the highly decorated, segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Tensions boiled over in the December 1942 Manzanar Riot, in which military police shot into a crowd of protesters, killing two.

Manzanar closed in November 1945 after the war's end. Decades of advocacy by former incarcerees and their descendants led to a formal government apology and reparations under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Reagan. Manzanar was designated a National Historic Site in 1992, and the National Park Service has since restored barracks, mess halls, and gardens, working closely with former incarcerees to interpret the site.