Navy Bans Japanese-American Citizens – ACLU Protests
The U.S. Navy on this day reiterated its policy of refusing to allow Japanese-American citizens to serve.
The Navy’s statement came in response to a criticism of the policy by the ACLU. The Acting Secretary of the Navy stated that the presence of Japanese-American sailors would “create collateral racial problems of a complex nature that cannot be handled adequately under wartime conditions.”
The Navy also excluded all women of Japanese ancestry from the WAVES.
The Navy spokesperson denied that the policy was based on any “fundamental distrust of the loyalty of this group,” but in a tortured explanation referred to “the peculiar conditions” “in [the] present naval warfare.”
During World War II, the U.S. armed forces were segregated by race. African-Americans served in the Army in separate units.
During the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war, some Japanese-American citizens were allowed to leave their internment camps and serve in the U.S. Army. The 442ned Infantry Regiment was composed almost entirely of Nisei, second generation Japanese. The unit fought in the European theater, and became the most decorated unit in American military history, earning a total of 18,000 awards in two years, including twenty-one Medals of Honor. One winner of a Medal of Honor was Daniel Inouye, who later became a U.S. member of the House of Representatives (1959-1962) Senator (1962-2012) from Hawaii.
Arguably the greatest civil liberties disaster in American history was the evacuation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the program on February 19, 1942.
Visit the Japanese-American Museum: http://www.janm.org/
Read: Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (2001)
View Dorothea Lange’s Internment Camp Photographs:
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/lange.htmlRead: Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro (eds), Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (2008)
Learn more: C. Douglas Sterner, Going for Broke: The Nisei Warriors of World War II Who Conquered Germany, Japan, and American Bigotry (2007)