A resolution that the San Diego City Council adopted eighty years ago endorsing the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II has been revoked.
Council members criticized the camps and the 1942 resolution that supported them during a Tuesday meeting as racist and unjust.
Sean Elo-Rivera, the council president, said, “We can accept the injustice that the city committed.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the council formally apologized to Japanese Americans.
Local Japanese American community leaders applauded the council’s choice, pointing out how many sent to the camps lost their possessions, educational opportunities, and dignity.
More than 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forcefully transferred to 10 camps in the western U.S. and Arkansas during World War II because they were seen as a threat to national security due to their ethnicity.
More than 1,900 people of Japanese origin from San Diego County were detained.
The San Diego chapter of the Japanese American Historical Society requested the council’s measures.
According to the society’s president Kay Ochi, the camps and the council’s resolution in support of them mirrored the prejudice and apprehension of the time. From 1942 through 1945, her parents—both residents of the United States—were detained in Arizona.
“That racial conduct caused profound and severe grief, the embarrassment that it brought onto the Japanese American community to be targeted as spies,” she said. You’re reiterating the city’s and your adherence to the Constitution’s commitments.
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