page_title: Dorothea Lange
section_title: Japanese American internment
hierarchical_section_title: Dorothea Lange / Career / Japanese American internment
caption_attribution_description: First-graders, some of Japanese ancestry, at the Weill public school, San Francisco, Calif., pledging allegiance to the United States flag. The evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be housed in War relocation authority centers for the duration of the war SUMMARY: Relocation of Japanese-Americans. Calif. SUBJECTS: World War, 1939-1945--Japanese Americans--California--San Francisco. MEDIUM: 1 photographic print.
context_page_description: Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. Lange's photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.
context_section_description: In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for achievement in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious fellowship to record the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the west coast on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). She covered the internment of Japanese Americans and their subsequent incarceration, traveling throughout urban and rural California to photograph families preparing to leave, visiting several temporary assembly centers as they opened, and eventually highlighting Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. Much of her work focused on the waiting and uncertainty involved in the removal: piles of luggage waiting to be sorted, families wearing identification tags while awaiting transport. To many observers, her photograph of Japanese American children pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to camp, is a haunting reminder of the travesty of detaining people without charging them with a crime.
  Sensitive to the implications of her images, authorities impounded most of the photographs Lange took of the internment and they were not seen publicly during the war. Today her photographs of the internment are available in the National Archives on the website of the Still Photographs Division and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
caption: Children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942, prior to the internment of Japanese Americans
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