What was Executive Order 9066 (Japanese Internment)?
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt, with Executive Order 9066, authorized the internment of an estimated 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens. For more than two and half years, internees suffered in cramped living quarters at compounds with barbed-wire fences despite the fact that the internees were a manifestly innocent minority. President Reagan in 1988 signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, a bill apologizing for the internment, and in 1990 the government began paying reparations to surviving internees.
