The First Pilgrimage: Returning to Remember Manzanar

By December of nineteen sixty-nine, the camp had been largely demolished. The barracks had been sold off after the war. The watchtowers were gone. The desert had taken back most of what the government had built here.

What remained were two things. The concrete sentry posts at the entrance, and the obelisk.

The obelisk was the one the internees had built themselves in nineteen forty-three and placed in the camp cemetery. Four Japanese characters are carved into its face. They read: soul consoling tower. The people who placed it there did not know it would outlast everything else at the site by decades.

In December of nineteen sixty-nine, about one hundred fifty Japanese Americans drove to this place for what they called the first pilgrimage. Many of them had been interned here. They had not been back. The activist Edison Uno and others organized the gathering as a deliberate act of memory, because the country's official memory of Manzanar was nearly nothing. No monument. No acknowledgment. A demolition site in a desert.

The pilgrimage restarted a movement.

The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which Congress established in nineteen eighty, took testimony from hundreds of survivors and published its findings in a report called "Personal Justice Denied." The report concluded that the incarceration had been driven by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.

In nineteen eighty-eight, the Civil Liberties Act provided a formal government apology and twenty thousand dollars to each surviving internee. Manzanar was designated a National Historic Site in nineteen ninety-two.

The pilgrimage that started it all still takes place every year.