FINAL EXAM REVIEW
ENGLISH II CP The Imprisonment of Japanese Citizens During WWII
* Over 127,000 United States citizens were imprisoned during WWII‐ Their crime? Being of Japanese ancestry.
*Despite any lack of concrete evidence, Japanese Americans were suspected of remaining loyal to their ancestral land. *ANTI‐JAPANESE PARANOIA increased because of a large Japanese presence on the West Coast. In the event of a Japanese invasion of the American mainland, Japanese Americans were feared as a security risk. * Japanese Americans were evacuated from their communities. Many families sold their homes, their stores, and most of their assets. * After being forced from their homes the families made these military style barracks their homes. *It made no difference that many had never even been to Japan. Even Japanese‐American veterans of WWI were forced to leave their homes. * Their were ten relocation camps built up throughout the United States. The camps were built in areas were the conditions were harsh. Winter was too cold, summer was too hot. The food was mass produced army‐style grub. If anyone tried to escape they were shot. *Fred Korematsu challenged the legality of the Japanese‐American imprisonment, but the Supreme Court ruled that the action was justified as a wartime necessity. *It was not until 1988 that the U.S. government attempted to apologize to those who had been imprisoned. * Even after the imprisoned were set free their lives remained very difficult. Many found they could not return to their hometowns. The hostility against them was still high across the West Coast and remained this way into the postwar years. * In 1988, Congress attempted to apologize for the action by awarding each surviving prisoner $20,000. AIDS HYSTERIA‐ Ryan White
*Ryan White died in 1990 at the age of 18 from AIDS.
*He was a hemophiliac and in 1984 he was diagnosed with AIDS
that he contracted from tainted blood‐clotting products. *When the affliction was revealed, fearful Kokomo authorities banned Ryan from Western Middle School– his mother then sued the school in order to have him reinstated.
* “They did not know you can’t get it from kissing, tears, sweat, saliva,” she said. * There were stacks of hate letters; garbage dumped on their lawn; and when they went out to eat restaurant patrons would commonly leave due to fear of contracting AIDS. * Even their church, St. Luke’s United Methodist Church was no refuge. The pastor insisted the family sit in the first or last pew so the congregation knew where they were at all times. * After nine long months, Ryan was able to return to Western Middle School, but was still ostracized. Obscenities were spray painted on his locker and students would scatter when they saw him coming. Rosewood Incident
* On January 1, 1923 a massacre was carried out in the small, predominantly black town of Rosewood in Central Florida. The massacre was instigated by the rumor that a white woman, Fanny Taylor, had been sexually assaulted by a black man in her home in a nearby community. A group of white men, believing this rapist to be a recently escaped convict named Jesse Hunter who was hiding in Rosewood, assembled to capture this man.
*Prior to this event a series of incidents had stirred racial tensions within Rosewood. During the previous winter of 1922 a white school teacher from Perry had been murdered and on New Years Eve of 1922 there was a Ku Klux Klan rally held in Gainesville, located not far away from Rosewood.
*In response to the allegation by Taylor, white men began to search for Jesse Hunter, Aaron Carrier and Sam Carter who were believed to be accomplices. Carrier was captured and incarcerated while Carter was lynched. The white mob suspected Aaron's cousin, Sylvester Carrier, a Rosewood resident of harboring the fugitive, Jesse Hunter.
* On January 4, 1923 a group of 20 to 30 white men approached the Carrier home and shot the family dog. When Sylvester's mother Sarah came to the porch to confront the mob they shot and killed her. Sylvester defended his home, killing two men and wounding four in the ensuing battle before he too was killed. The remaining survivors fled to the swamps for refuge where many of the African American residents of Rosewood had already retreated, hoping to avoid the rising conflict and increasing racial tension.
* The next day the white mob burned the Carrier home before joining with a group of 200 men from surrounding towns who had heard erroneously that a black man had killed two white men. As night descended the mob attacked the town, slaughtering animals and burning buildings. An official report claims six blacks killed along with two whites. Other accounts suggest a larger total. At the end of the carnage only two buildings remained standing, a house and the town general store.
* Many of the black residents of Rosewood who fled to the swamps were evacuated on January 6 by two local train conductors, John and William Bryce. Many others were hidden by John Wright, the owner of the general store. Other black residents of Rosewood fled to Gainesville and to northern cities. As a consequence of the massacre, Rosewood became deserted.
*The initial report of the Rosewood incident presented less than a month after the massacre claimed there was insufficient evidence for prosecution. Thus no one was charged with any of the Rosewood murders. In 1994, however, as the result of new evidence and renewed interest in the event, the Florida Legislature passed the Rosewood Bill which entitled the nine survivors to $150,000 dollars each in compensation.
The Holocaust
* The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state‐
sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so‐called German racial community.
* During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah Witnesses, and homosexuals. Scottsboro Trials
During the 1930s, much of the world's attention was riveted on the "Scottsboro Boys," nine black youths falsely charged with raping two white women in Alabama. This case, more than any other event in the South during the 1930s, revealed the barbarous treatment of blacks. The case began on March 25, 1931, when a number of white and black youths were riding on a freight train, traveling to see if they could find work. A fight broke out between a group of black and white hobos, and the whites were thrown off the train. They reported the incident to a stationmaster, who wired ahead for officials to stop the train at a town called Paint Rock. Dozens of armed men rounded up nine black youths and took them to jail. They were about to be charged with assault when two white women, dressed in boys clothing, were discovered hiding on the train. Although there was no evidence connecting the youth to the women, the nine youths were charged with raping the women. The women ‐‐ who had had sexual relations with some of the white men thrown off the train and fearing prosecution for their sexual activity with the white men ‐‐ agreed to testify against the black youths. The trial was held in the town of Scottsboro, Alabama. The all‐white jury convicted the nine, and all but the youngest, who was 12 years old, were sentenced to death.
The Kent State Riots
*On April 30, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon appeared on national television to announce the invasion of Cambodia by the United States and the need to draft 150,000 more soldiers for an expansion of the Vietnam War effort. This provoked massive protests on campuses throughout the country. At Kent State University in Ohio, protesters launched a demonstration that included setting fire to the ROTC building, prompting the governor of Ohio to dispatch 900 National Guardsmen to the campus.
*During an altercation on May 4, twenty‐eight guardsmen opened fire on a crowd, killing four students and wounding nine. Following the killings, the unrest across the country escalated even further. Almost five hundred colleges were shut down or disrupted by protests. Despite the public outcry, the Justice Department initially declined to conduct a grand jury investigation. A report by the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest did acknowledge, however, that the action of the guardsmen had been “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.” Eventually, a grand jury indicted eight of the guardsmen, but the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence.
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