Joseph Kurihara watched the furniture pile higher and higher on the streets of Terminal Island. Tables and chairs, mattresses and bed frames, refrigerators and radio consoles had been dragged into alleyways and arranged in haphazard stacks. It was February 25, 1942, two and a half months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. Navy had given the island’s residents 48 hours to pack up and leave.An industrial stretch of land in the Port of Los Angeles, Terminal Island was home to a string of canneries, a Japanese American fishing community of about 3,500, and, crucially, a naval base. A week earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to designate areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” The order made no mention of race, but its target was clear: people who were ethnically Japanese.FBI agents had already rounded up and… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.
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