Leupp's 83 Prisoners: Arizona's Forgotten 1943 Japanese-American Internment Tragedy

Presented by John Westerlund, Ph.D., Historian and Author. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 imprisoned 120,000 Japanese-Americans in ten large Relocation Centers around the American West. Protests, strikes, and riots soon followed. Most ‘internees’ were American citizens and young men who especially resented the treatment. Those who caused problems were labeled ‘troublemakers’ and first sent to Moab, Utah, and then soon to one of the most desolate yet confining places in the West – the abandoned Indian boarding school on the Navajo Indian Reservation at Leupp, Arizona. This discussion examines American history contributing to the Executive Order, the organization for internment, and the confinement – without charges filed, without hearings, without any trials – of 83 young Japanese-American men at Leupp for most of 1943.