Bay Area Day of Remembrance to Focus on ‘Fragile Freedoms’

SAN FRANCISCO — “Fragile Freedoms: Carrying the Light for Justice,” the 2017 Bay Area Day of Remembrance program, will be held on Sunday, Feb. 19, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Sundance Kabuki Cinema, 1881 Post St. in San Francisco Japantown.

The program will be followed by a candlelight procession to the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, 1840 Sutter St.

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, setting into motion the wartime mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast, two-thirds of them American citizens by birth and most of them long-term residents of the U.S. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and under the guise of military necessity, these civilians were rounded up and forcibly removed from their homes without due process and held in concentration camps for the duration of the war.

There were no cases of espionage or sabotage committed by Japanese Americans on the continental U.S. It was found that there was no military necessity for their treatment; instead, there was falsification of evidence, suppression of such evidence and fraud upon the Supreme Court.

On the 75th anniversary of the executive order, the Bay Area Day of Remembrance Consortium commemorates the fragility of the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution and unites with the most marginalized communities in these current times.

Scheduled keynote speaker: California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. Speaker: Don Tamaki, coram nobis legal team member. Choreographer/dancer Lenora Lee will perform “EO 9066.”

Funded in part by the San Francisco Japantown Foundation and San Francisco Grants for the Arts. Suggested donation: $10.

For more information: National Japanese American Historical Society, www.njahs.org.