Japanese American Incarceration and the Fresno Assembly Center

In the spring of nineteen forty-two, the Fresno County Fairgrounds became a prison. The federal government had issued Executive Order Nine Zero Six Six in February, authorizing the military to remove people of Japanese descent from the West Coast. The fairgrounds at Kings Canyon and Chance avenues, which in ordinary years hosted livestock competitions and agricultural exhibitions, were enclosed with barbed wire and guard towers and designated an assembly center.

Between May and October of nineteen forty-two, more than five thousand Japanese Americans from the Fresno area and the surrounding San Joaquin Valley were processed through the Fresno Assembly Center. They were given days or hours to dispose of their property, close their businesses, and appear at the assembly point with whatever they could carry. The farms they left behind, some of them the product of decades of work, were taken over by neighbors, by banks, or left to deteriorate. The evacuation order did not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, between people born in Japan and people born in Fresno. The order applied to anyone of Japanese ancestry.

The assembly center was a temporary holding facility, not a long-term camp. From Fresno, families were transferred by train to the Jerome War Relocation Authority Center in Arkansas and the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona, where they remained for the duration of the war. The War Relocation Authority euphemism for these facilities was relocation center. The facilities were internment camps. They were enclosed by fences. Guards prevented departure. The inmates had committed no crime.

The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion order in Korematsu versus United States in nineteen forty-four. The decision remained on the books as a technically valid precedent for more than seventy years. The Supreme Court in twenty eighteen, in Trump versus Hawaii, formally repudiated the Korematsu decision, though by then the Japanese American community had already received a formal apology from the United States government through the Civil Liberties Act of nineteen eighty-eight, which acknowledged that the incarceration had been wrong and provided reparations of twenty thousand dollars per surviving detainee.

The Fresno fairgrounds are still there. The fair still runs every year. The assembly center's history is not prominently marked on the site as of the last available documentation of signage.