Obama making WWII internment camp in Hawaii a national monument
Source: LA Times
For more than half a century, what had once been Hawaii's largest and longest-operating internment camp was ignored and forgotten. To the hundreds of Japanese Americans who had been forcibly confined at the camp, the experience was a source of shame and rarely spoken of until it was rediscovered by historians more than a decade ago.
On Thursday, President Obama will designate the plot of land in western Oahu that was the site of the Honouliuli camp as a national monument, White House officials told the Los Angeles Times. The designation is intended to bring greater awareness to it and to Hawaii's distinct role in the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans and what the White House calls "the fragility of civil rights during times of conflict."
The announcement will come 73 years to the day after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the executive order paving the way for the internment of Japanese Americans, a few months after Japan bombed Hawaii's Pearl Harbor and drew the U.S. into the war.
That order ultimately led to the imprisonment of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast at 10 mainland internment cites, including Manzanar in California. But in Hawaii, then a U.S. territory, more than 1,000 people were interrogated and ultimately imprisoned under martial law that was declared after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-hawaii-japanese-internment-20150218-story.html
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.... a monument to the 'frailty of civil rights' ... as it were.
