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War Relocation Centers Table

677

WRA Relocation Centers[88]
Name State Opened Max. Pop'n
Manzanar California March 1942 10,046
Tule Lake California May 1942 18,789
Poston Arizona May 1942 17,814
Gila River Arizona July 1942 13,348
Granada Colorado August 1942 7,318
Heart Mountain Wyoming August 1942 10,767
Minidoka Idaho August 1942 9,397
Topaz Utah September 1942 8,130
Rohwer Arkansas September 1942 8,475
Jerome Arkansas October 1942 8,497

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Concentration Camps and Lynch Mobs on the Home Front: "Total War" in Los Angeles, 1939-1945 [DO NOT EDIT: MOVED TO MADE WITH HATE 26 SEPT 2018
World War II engaged hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Fifty million were killed overall, and most of those were civilians. Civilians toiled, loved, lost and died on every continent, from Tokyo and Osaka to Los Angeles and New York City, from London to Berlin, Shanghai, and Manila. In very real terms, World War II was fought by cities and against cities. Great cities contain the social power and command of entire nations. Heavy industries were located close to the great labor forces of Los Angeles, Chicago and New Jersey. These war workers were recognized as essential war workers, and were bombed as legitimate military targets. Seeing the civilians in war-supporting industries as combatants is the central meaning of the term "total war." Total war is the industrial type, in which urban industrial centers are just as deadly as the canons they produce. Best to destroy the source of warplanes or oil than to fight against them on the front.

Let us then consider "civilians" in total war, on the streets of Los Angeles, a major production center. Pearl Harbor attack of 7 December 1941 brought serious danger to the streets of Los Angeles, a major strategic asset because of its oil production, large aircraft and ship production, and a workforce of millions. It would certainly be a target for any serious Japanese Imperial war plans against the United States. But ironically, Los Angeles was already in a race war, and the greatest threat to Angelenos was the U.S. Government and the Armed Forces.

The fates of all non-white peoples were in great peril, at home and abroad. Carey McWilliams described the “Earthquake” that struck the Japanese American community, even before the implementation of Executive Order 9066. The racial round-ups began with “disastrous effects of the summary ouster of the Japanese fishing colony – five hundred families – from Terminal Island. On February 15, these families were told they were expected to move within thirty days; later, they were given twenty-four hours in which to vacate. The utmost confusion prevailed, as families sought to find places into which they might move, and tried frantically to dispose of their effects.”[12]

The 1942 “Internment,” police and national guardsmen rounded-up tens of thousands of Angelenos--entire families--and assembled them first in the humiliation of the Santa Anita Racetrack. By 1943, more than 120,000 California Issei (first generation, ineligible for U.S. citizenship), Nisei (second generation, all U.S. citizens), and Sansei (third generation, also U.S. citizens) were being held in remote concentration camps, first at Manzanar and then *** other War Relocation Centers.Note.

Most of the prisoners had resided in Los Angeles County. Los Angeles, already a landscape of segregated hierarchies of apartheid, conveniently concentrated the nonwhite peoples in specific places, subject to surveillance and if needed, round-ups. When the novelist Chester Himes moved to LA in 1941, he considered racial attacks so likely that he "used to keep my Winchester rifle within reach at all times”. The protagonist in his autobiographical1945 novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (the suffers nightmares of the massive round-up: “Little Riki Oyana singing ‘God Bless America’ and going to Santa Anita [Racetrack] the next day….taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance. Without a trial. Without charge. Without even giving him a chance to say one word.."[11]

It was a case of ethnic cleansing that was the direct result of a Anti-Japanese political movement that had been widely supported by European-descended Californians and their leaders since the 1910s. The Alien Land Act of 1913 had attempted to bar Japanese from holding property in California, and the Anti-Japanese League *** claimed *** members across the state.

Mobilization and war production drew tens of thousands of African Americans to Los Angeles, accelerating after Executive Order 8088 in 1940. During the 1940s the African-American population of Los Angeles increased from *** to ***. The great demand for war production workers also brought thousands of Mexican "Braceros" to LA, along with migrating Mexican Americans from throughout the southwest. The increased race hatreds of the Pacific War slammed into the streets of LA during a shore leave by U.S. Navy sailors.

On 3 June 1943, mobs of U.S. Navy and other uniformed servicemen, shouting charges of disloyalty, hunted Mexican Americans, Filipinos, and African Americans, dragging them from theaters and buses, beating and stripping them on the sidewalks. “The police and sheriffs, rather than arresting the perpetrators, arrested the victims” after "standing by to watch.”[13] These violent interventions have been called the "Zoot Suit Riots" but were in fact waves of white lynch mobs. The racist and violent invasions of Mexican-American, black, and Filipino neighborhood lasted ten terrifying days before the Navy Commandant, apparently satisfied that his men had had enough entertainment, ordered a service personnel back to their bases.

The symbol of the enemy to these white soldiers and sailors was the extravagant zoot suit, and the zoot suit, in turn “symbolized a [young] generation filling the streets….It was bountiful, but first of all it was big.” The extra fabric was worn in defiance of the rationing of fabric.[14] RJ Smith and Scott Kurashige have shown how the Zoot Suit pogrom galvanized African American leaders such as the lawyer and LA Sentinel writer Loren Miller, LA Eagle Editor Charlotta Bass and Rev. Clayton Russell, pastor of the People’s Independent Church, stepped up pressure on Mayor Bowron and other official to stop their official silence condoning racial hatred. Hundreds mobilized, as in the “battle of 12th Street,” when Latino youth travelled miles to defend the African-American Eastside just at the south end of Downtown. “At least 500 Latino gang members came into the neighborhood,” writes Smith, “including members of the Jug Town, Adams, Clanton, Watts, 38th Street, and Jardine crews.” Combatant Rudy Leyvas “All day we were just transferring guys from the neighborhoods into the city. The black people loaned us their cars to use. We used to call them ‘neighborhoods,’ not gangs.”[15]