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Executive Order 9066

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With baggage stacked, residents of Japanese ancestry await a bus at the Wartime Civil Control Administration station, 2020 Van Ness Avenue, as part of the first group of 664 to be evacuated from San Francisco on April 6, 1942. Evacuees will be housed in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration. (National Archives)
With baggage stacked, residents of Japanese ancestry await a bus at the Wartime Civil Control Administration station, 2020 Van Ness Avenue, as part of the first group of 664 to be evacuated from San Francisco on April 6, 1942.
(National Archives)

A war measure following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Signed Feb. 19, 1942, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, it led to the internment in camps of [117,000 people] of Japanese heritage, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. A divided cabinet recommended the measure to Roosevelt, despite an affirmation by the Office of Naval Intelligence of the loyalty of Japanese Americans. The order was designed to combat sabotage, but Americans of German and Italian heritage were largely exempt. Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan formed the Axis. The United States Supreme Court repeatedly affirmed the constitutionality of the order, but Congress, in 1983, called it “a grave injustice.”

Text of Executive Order 9066

See Angel Island; internment, Japanese.

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REFERENCE: AAJA Handbook to Covering Asian America 
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