Presented by: John Westerlund, Ph.D., Historian and Author

Just weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, which sent 120,000 Japanese Americans (most of whom were American citizens) to hastily-constructed internment camps scattered around the most barren corners of the American West — to include large camps at Poston and Sacaton, Arizona. Tempers soon flared as internees were subjected to crowded conditions, loss of employment, strict rules, arbitrary inspections, loss of civil rights, and embitterment between generations. Riots broke out at Manzanar. Strikes and protests plagued other camps as well. Eighty two suspects, mostly young men, were rounded up in early 1943. They were never charged with an offense but were stripped of their legal rights and shipped off to an empty Civilian Conservation Camp near Moab, Utah, and then to an abandoned Indian boarding school on the Navajo Indian Reservation at Leupp, Arizona. Their story is an extraordinary example of wartime prejudice, fear, and politics. Was their evacuation to an isolated corner of Arizona justified or was it an example of democracy at its worst? Was this chapter of our history a natural harvest of three centuries of the American experience or just another precaution against enemy sabotage on the Pacific coast?

Visitor Center, Riordan Mansion State Historic Park, 409 W. Riordan Rd., Flagstaff, AZ 86001. Phone: 928-779-4395.
Lecture is Free. Does not include tour admission to Riordan Mansion.

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