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20th Anniversary of the Civil Liberties Act to be Celebrated
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Media Contact: Dana Navarro
August 25, 2008 (773) 442-4227
d-navarro@neiu.edu
**Interview Opportunities Available
20th Anniversary of the Civil Liberties Act
to be Celebrated at NEIU
New Book “Soldiers of Conscience” Highlights Japanese-American Imprisonment During WWII and Recalls the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilian Hearings Held in 1981 on NEIU Campus
CHICAGO – Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) Professor Emerita Dr. Shirley Castelnuovo will speak on Thursday, September 25 at 7 p.m. in the NEIU Student Union Building about her book “Soldiers of Conscience: Japanese-American Military Resisters in World War II” (Praeger, 2008). The talk is free and open to the public.
The book describes how during World War II more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated in U.S. internment camps. United States Executive Order 9066, issued by Franklin D. Roosevelt, sent ethnic groups with “Foreign Enemy Ancestry” – Japanese, Italians and Germans – to these camps.
The internment camps were overcrowded and provided poor living conditions; detainees were housed in tarpaper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind.
Executive Order 9066 was overturned by President Ford in 1976, and in 1980 the Carter Administration instituted legislation to develop the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to conduct hearings regarding the legality of this wartime mandate. The CWRIC conducted an official governmental study of Executive Order 9066 and related wartime orders and their impact on Japanese-Americans in the western United States along with Alaska Natives in the Pribilof Islands. In 1981, Northeastern Illinois University was selected as the Chicago site for these historic hearings.
In 1983 the CWRIC concluded that the incarceration of Japanese-Americans had not been justified, and the Reagan administration recommended legislative resolves consisting of an official government apology, redress payments of $20,000 to each of the survivors, and a public education fund to help ensure that this would not happen again.
Joining Dr. Castelnuovo at NEIU will be Sam Ozaki from the Midwest Japanese American Citizens League who will discuss the 1981 Commission hearings at NEIU and the 20th anniversary of the signing of the “Civil Liberties Act of 1988,” which provided the apology and the monetary compensation to individuals affected by Executive Order 9066.
NEIU is located at 5500 N. Saint Louis Ave. in Chicago (Use campus entrance located at 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) For additional information, please call David Leaman at (773) 442 – 5657
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