Because the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 has just passed…and I’m always surprised by how many people have never heard of it, or only learned about it later in life.
I think it was in high school (mid 60’s for me). Maybe earlier, I’m not sure. I feel like it’s something that I always knew. Maybe it’s because I grew up on the west coast.
I’m pretty sure it was in middle school for me, but like **Roderick **I don’t remember not knowing about it.
I learned about it at age 10, in 1984, after I asked my dad to explain a plot point in Karate Kid.
As a young child. My grandfather worked building the camp in Topaz, Utah so it was part of the family history. My mother, her mother and my uncle and aunts lived with her grandparents while her father was away.
Farewell to Manzanar was required reading at our school; I want to say around 6th grade.
I learned about it in junior high, from a series of books about a teenage detective/spy named Doris Fein. They were by T. Ernesto Bethancourt. It was mentioned in several of them. Doris had a boyfriend who was Japanese-American, and members of his family had been interned.
On a related subject, I learned about the Holocaust from a book I read in third grade called The Endless Steppe. It was a memoir by Esther Hautzig. Her immediate family and grandparents were sent to Siberia (from Poland) so they survived (except her grandfather, who was lost to illness) but the rest of her extended family died in the Holocaust.
My grandfather was an accountant for a sugar plantation in Hawaii where many of the workers were Japanese or of Japanese origin. Because he knew the workers and they trusted him the Army required him to escort the workers in his area to an internment camp. Fortunatly about a week later it was realized that the islands would starve without the Japanese agricultural workers and my grandfather was happily able to get them out.
When I was 5 or 6 but from my Dad rather than school. In school it never came up until maybe junior or senior year – early 70s. Dad was already in China when Pearl Harbor happened and he didn’t learn about it until near the end of the war and it just always annoyed him that it had been done; it was something he just automatically found very wrong. So it became a standard lesson he passed on to all of us about the time we could walk and think.
I don’t remember. It just seems like I’ve always known.
I’m pretty sure middle school (I had an 8th grade Social Studies teacher who was a WWII vet and rather candid about such things) but it might have been earlier and my 8th grade memories are just starker. In any case, before high school.
I grew up in Wyoming, the site of Heart Mountain Relocation Camp. We learned about Japanese internment in elementary school, and many Wyoming students visit it on field trips.
Probably before high school. Presented very vaguely, though, without connecting responsibility for it to Roosevelt or an executive order.
I’m guessing it was high school (11th grade US history), but I’m not 100% sure. I certainly don’t remember what my initial reaction was upon learning about it, which makes me think that we didn’t cover it in any serious detail.
This weekend I listened to the “Things You Didn’t Learn in History Class” podcast about the internment and I learned some really interesting things:
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Japanese immigrants could not become citizens until the 1950s.
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The US government had the audacity to draft internees (the ones who were citizens) for the war. Imagine how you would feel as a dying soldier on the front lines, knowing that you’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for a country that has imprisoned your whole family because they are deemed disloyal and not good enough for citizenship.
'- An American citizen, Fred Korematsu, underwent plastic surgery and changed his name to avoid detection. But he was discovered and arrested and sent to an internment camp like everyone else in his family. The ACLU took up his case and sued the federal government for violating his civil rights. They lost.
I chose 18 - 22, but it might have been earlier. I don’t remember how I learned about it. It wasn’t in school though. We barely glanced at WWII in history except to say we won by dropping the bomb and Hitler was bad.
Huh, I really have no idea when or how I learned about it (although, by contrast, I have really vivid memories of learning about the Holocaust when I was ten, via posters on the walls of the Hebrew school that rented out space to our church for CCD classes – I remember finding it very difficult to take the idea of a loving God seriously after that). Definitely by high school, maybe as early as elementary school?
Grew up in Norcal and had several families that had been in the camps (Tule Lake). They got shipped out of a rural farm town, and then came back penniless after release because it was the only place they knew.
Some had their families in camps and served in WW2, including one guy that used to go behind Japanese lines to get intel. That was one brave man.
I remember learning about the internment in my GATE program in elementary school. It helped that a teacher at the school was an internee herself, and had a member of the 442nd RCT speak to us as well.
Learned about it from my parents before I was taught about it in school. They thought it was important that I know about it. They thought it was shameful and they liked FDR for the most part. I was probably 10 years old give or take.
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In elementary school in the mid 70s.