Life Beyond the Barbed Wire
In 1945, the last concentration camp closed five months after the war. When some Japanese Americans were released from the internment camps they renounced their United States citizenship due to the infringement on their civil liberties. Japanese Americans tried to return to the communities that they were from before the war, but anti-Japanese sentiments remained. Japanese Americans were not welcomed back into the communities that they once owned business, lived in, and worked in. People posted sings stating that Japanese need not apply and that they were no longer welcome. Japanese Americans retaliated to this ignorance by saying that they are American too. Many years later in 1988 the government tried to make reparations to the living interment victims. They paid each survivor, which was about 60,000 people, $20,000. These reparations came too late and money did not repair everything they lost. Can you erase the damage caused by racism?