Last month I saw the Broadway musical "Allegiance" with my 91-year-old Nisei actress friend, Michi Kobi. Its subject is the uprooting and internment of 115,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans on the West Coast following Executive Order 9066 in February 1942.
In signing the order, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that a war required "every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage." In his dissent in a 6-3 decision on Korematsu v. the United States (1944), Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy called the action "the ugly abyss of racism."
The masses of people so uprooted were dispersed in 10 "detention camps" where hastily built shacks in isolated desert or swamp areas that ranged from Heart Mountain, Wyoming, to Jerome, Arkansas. Michi, who was born and grew up in Sacramento, spent four years in the Topaz Detention Camp in Utah, 200 km southwest of Salt Lake City, from 1942 to 1945. Located in arid desert, the area had no real name until after the camp was set up.
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