The Stockton Assembly Center, Nineteen Forty-Two
Near Stockton, California
Before the war, Stockton's Japanese American community had built something substantial. Families farmed the delta islands, operated produce markets, ran the flower stalls on El Dorado Street, and had sent children to local schools for two generations. The community was, by any ordinary measure, Stockton's. It had been here since the early decades of the century.
On February nineteenth, nineteen forty-two, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order ninety-sixty-six, authorizing the forced removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast military zones. Stockton fell within the zone.
Between May tenth and October seventeenth of nineteen forty-two, the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds in Stockton functioned as an Assembly Center, one of the temporary holding facilities the Army established while constructing the more permanent internment camps inland. Approximately four thousand two hundred Japanese Americans were processed through the Stockton Assembly Center and held there under guard before transfer to internment camps in the interior states.
They were allowed to take only what they could carry. Farms were left to neighbors or to strangers. Businesses were liquidated at a fraction of value or simply abandoned. The flower stalls went dark.
Release began in December of nineteen forty-four, but most camps did not close until sometime in nineteen forty-five. When families returned to Stockton, the farms and businesses they had built were largely gone. The legal mechanism that had authorized the removal, Executive Order ninety-sixty-six, was not formally rescinded until nineteen seventy-six. In nineteen eighty-eight, Congress issued a formal apology and authorized reparations of twenty thousand dollars per surviving detainee.
The fairgrounds are still in use today.
