Title: Born Free and Equal
Description: In 1944 Ansel Adams published a long essay on the Japanese-American relocation camps together with about 65 photos of the Manzanar camp in a book called "Born Free and Equal," subtitled "The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans." Manzanar was one of ten relocation centers formed by an executive order issued by President Roosevelt in early 1942, just a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. About 110,000 people of Japanese descent were interned in these camps; of those, over 60% were native born American citizens. There were no charges of disloyalty, no trials, and no hearings. While the internment is almost universally recognized today as unjust, at the time it was strongly supported by most Americans, especially on the west coast. (In 1983 a commission established by the US Congress called the internment "unjust and motivated by racism rather than real military necessity" and reparations were paid. The US Supreme Court never explicitly ruled the internment unconstitutional.) When Adams exhibited his Manzanar photographs at the Museum of Modern Art and then published his book, the response was extreme hostility and accusations against Adams of disloyalty. Not many copies of the book were printed, some of those were destroyed, and today the book is almost impossible to find. But, fortunately, the Library of Congress has placed images of the original book on its website. The text is from the original, using optical-character-recognition (OCR) and careful proofreading. The images are taken from prints that Adams donated to the Library of Congress and scanned by LC. Five landscapes not directly related to Manzanar are omitted because Adams did not release them into the public domain along with the other images. Other than those, all of Adams's words and pictures are here. - Publisher.