More than a century after Native Americans walked the Trail of Tears, more than 75 years after the abolition of slavery, a bigotry born of war hysteria took hold, and once again, in a collective act of cowardice, our nation did the unthinkable.
On Feb. 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Civilian Exclusion Order No. 5, and American authorities began rounding up 120,000 enterprising citizens and immigrants on the West Coast and sending them off to internment camps.
These individuals - men, women, children; doctors, shopkeepers, laborers - posed no real danger, except to our sense of well-being. Yet they were rousted from their homes with just 48 hours notice and sent away with the clothes on their backs and the possessions they could carry.
Their crime? They were of Japanese descent. Our crime? An unforgivable, and hopefully unforgettable, act of racism.
Officially, the camps were called "war relocation centers," but don't kid yourself. It's a candy-coated name for prisons.
The residents lived in wooden barracks with tar-paper roofs in camps surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. They tossed and turned on Army cots in stifling summer heat, and huddled around pot-bellied stoves for warmth in winter. Entire blocks shared dining and restroom facilities, where toilet and shower stalls had no doors.
One of the camps was scratched into the sand in the Sevier Desert in the shadows of Topaz Mountain in Millard County, 140 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. With more than 8,100 residents, Topaz Camp was Utah's fifth-largest city for the duration of World War II.
Today, as a local group collects artifacts and struggles to erect a permanent museum, only a few concrete foundations, some scraps of wood and sheetrock, and a small, stone monument to the residents remain.
But in an attempt to jar our memories, and in a move that is sure to give the local group a boost, the federal government last week designated the camp as a National Historic Landmark. So we never forget what happened in the desert. But more important, so we never repeat it.
Memories fade. Injustice is often forgiven, then forgotten. Some say it is better that way, but those who know what happened at Topaz in the West Desert of Utah agree that it is not.
