-
Back Cover
- University Press of Kansas
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Roger Daniels served as a consultant with the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. He is the Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Cincinnati and author of more than a dozen books, including Prisoners without Trial; Concentration Camps, North America; and The Politics of Prejudice. After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt, claiming a never documented “military necessity,” ordered the removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II solely because of their ancestry. As Roger Daniels movingly describes, almost all reluctantly obeyed their government and went peacefully to the desolate camps provided for them. Daniels, however, focuses on four Nisei, secondgeneration Japanese Americans, who, aided by a handful of lawyers, defied the government and their own community leaders by challenging the constitutionality of the government’s orders. The 1942 convictions of three men—Min Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Fred Korematsu—who refused to go willingly were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944. But a woman, Mitsuye Endo, who obediently went to camp and then filed for a writ of habeas corpus, won her case. The Supreme Court subsequently ordered her release in 1944, following her two and a half years behind barbed wire. Daniels traces the continuing changes in attitudes since the 1980s about the wartime cases and offers a sobering account that resonates with present-day issues of national security and individual freedom. “A clear and candid account of one of the great failures of American civil rights.” allan ryan, author of Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice, and Command Accountability Landmark Law Cases and American Society Peter Charles Hoffer & N. E. H. Hull, Series Editors Photograph by Dorothea Lange (1895–1965). The Mochida family waiting for the evacuation bus in Hayward, California, May 8, 1942. Identification tags were used to aid in keeping the family unit intact during all phases of evacuation. National Archives. University Press of Kansas Lawrence KS 66045 www.kansaspress.ku.edu ...