In the wake of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the mass removal from the West Coast of “all persons deemed a threat to national security.”

The policy, Executive Order 9066 , was incited by widespread anti-Japanese American discrimination and set the stage for mass eviction, evacuation and incarceration of 120,000 first-generation Japanese immigrants, known as Issei, and Nisei, who were U.S. citizens by birthright.

They were penned into camps across desolate regions in California, Arizona, Wyoming and Colorado, among other states.

To add to the degradation, Americans of Japanese descent were initially denied the opportunity to serve their country. That changed, however, in 1944, as the United States — pulled into a world war — need

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