page_title: History of racial segregation in the United States
section_title: Japanese-American internment
hierarchical_section_title: History of racial segregation in the United States / Japanese-American internment
context_page_description: Racial segregation means separating people because of their races. In the United States, racial segregation has existed since before the United States was its own country. Slavery, racist laws, racist attitudes, and many other things caused the United States to segregate white and non-white people for centuries. Although segregation is now against the law, racist attitudes still remain, and new forms of segregation have formed over time.
context_section_description: On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and declared war on the United States.  This caused the United States to enter World War II and start fighting Japan, as well as Nazi Germany and Italy.
  In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order that allowed the military to force people to leave the West Coast.  However, Japanese-Americans were the only people on the West Coast who were forced to leave.  They were given 48 hours to leave their homes for internment camps.  These were camps where Japanese-Americans were kept separate from everybody else.  The camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers with guns.
  The United States government forced over 110,000 Japanese-American people into internment camps.  (This was over 80% of the Japanese-American people who lived in the continental United States at the time.)  More than three out of every five of these people were born in the United States, and were United States citizens.  About half were children.
  Because the United States was fighting Nazi Germany and Italy as well as Japan, some German-Americans and Italian-Americans were forced into internment camps too.  So were some Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.  However, none of this was as common as it was with Japanese-Americans.
  In 1945, the year World War II ended, the United States let people out of the camps.  However, many of the people who were interned had lost everything they had.  In 1988, the United States government finally apologized and said that there was no reason for the internment other than racism.
caption: Manzanar internment camp
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