War Relocation Authority Camps

War Relocation Authority Camps in Arizona, 1942-1946 On March 18, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9102, "Establishing the War Relocation Authority in the Executive Office of the President and Defining its Functions and Duties." This order created a civilian agency in the Office for Emergency Management to provide for the removal of persons or classes of people from designated areas as previously denoted under Executive Order No. 9066. The Authority embarked on a rapid trajectory …

…the early 1900s, the Nisei, the second generation born in America, and the Kibei, also second generation born here but educated in Japan. The melange of individuals and administrators in the camps, coupled with the social, political and psychological dissonances of the relocation conditions, engendered numerous responses in their combined efforts to construct community from chaos. An anonymous poem circulated at the Poston camp, entitled That Damned Fence, illustrates the despair felt by the evacuees.