The Greater Los Angeles Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League will present a virtual program, “My Life in a Concentration Camp, Manzanar,” on Sunday, June 12, at 1 p.m.
The guest speaker, Joyce Okazaki, was born in the U.S. and is a citizen. She should have been protected by the Constitution. Instead, she and 120,000 others had their civil liberties taken away because of their ethnicity. They were uprooted from their homes, taken from their jobs, made to withdraw from college, and had to get rid of their possessions on short notice in order to obey U.S. military orders to evacuate the West Coast, because of Executive Order 9066 and Lt. Gen. James L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command.
Okazaki has given talks on this historical period to many middle school and high school history classes, college social science classes, and civic, social, and religious groups. Most recently, she has given a class on YouTube for a discussion on discrimination and via Zoom to high school class in Illinois.
For a Zoom link to the program, email Louise Sakamoto at greaterlajacl@gmail.com