Materials

• Copy of “Home Was a Horse Stall” by Jim Carnes
• Colored pencils

Instructional Activities

1. Provide some historical background on Japanese internment in the United States. Explain to students that after the attack on Pearl Harbor, all Japanese in the U.S., even Japanese Americans, were seen as the enemy by the American public and the federal government. By Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, all Japanese (Issei) and Americans of Japanese ancestry (Nisei) were to be removed from Western coastal regions and put into guarded camps in the interior.
   
   
2. To understand the personal toll that internment took on individuals and families, have students read “Home Was a Horse Stall” by Jim Carnes, one of 14 stories of intolerance in America found in the magazine Us and Them, distributed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Access the story online at the Web site of Tolerance.org <http://www.tolerance.org/teach/activities/activity.jsp?p=0&ar=248&pa=4>. This short story is about a young Japanese American woman in 1942 pondering the meaning of freedom behind barbed wire in an internment camp in California.
   
   
3. After students have read the story, hold a class discussion, using the following questions:
   • What are some historical examples of discrimination against Japanese that are mentioned in the story?
   • What often caused racial tensions to surface since the early 1800s?
   • What was white Americans’ typical response to the attack on Pearl Harbor?
   • How did the Kataokas prepare for evacuation?
   • What example in the story explains that not all whites saw the Japanese as the enemy?
   • What were the conditions in the camps?
   • How did the Japanese respond to internment?
   • If you were a Japanese American, would you have fought for the United States in the army upon President Roosevelt’s request?
   • Do you feel the President made the right decision?
   
   
4. Following the discussion, have students create a historical marker for one of the Japanese internment camps. Additional information on the internment camps can be found at
   • “Suffering Under a Great Injustice.” Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aamhtml/>
   • Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters during World War II — Dorothea Lange. <http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0013.html>.
   
   On their historical marker, students should include an illustration with an inscription that discusses the historical significance of the site.
   
   
5. Have students read the article “Wartime and the Bill of Rights: The Korematsu Case” found on the Web site The Bill of Rights in Action of The Constitutional Rights Foundationat <http://www.crf-usa.org/bria/bria18_3.htm>. This article discusses the constitutional challenge to President Roosevelt’s executive order. The article also provides students with an opportunity to discuss current civil liberty issues related to the USA Patriotic Act.