Two of the ten camps that the U.S. government established to incarcerate over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II weren’t out West; they were deep in the Jim Crow South. This sudden arrival of strangers who belonged on neither side of the color line has long been a lost chapter in the history of the war—until now.
Enter Concentration Camps on the Home Front, an incendiary, stirring depiction of life in the camps and its aftermath. John Howard breaks new ground with the first book to tell the story of the Southern camps; the first to reveal government efforts to convert inmates to Christianity; the first to explore prisoners’ acts of resistance and defiance; and the first to expose the calculated dispersal of the prisoners after the war, a move which aimed to prevent the creation of ethnic enclaves in both Northern cities and the Southern countryside.
Howard’s eye-opening account of one of modern American history’s most shameful episodes resonates with current debates over the government’s right to imprison without trial, racial profiling, and a host of other contemporary issues. But this disturbing story makes its greatest impact by bringing to light the widespread and irreversible damage the camps did to individuals, families, and communities.
Read the press release.