Trying to make right...



On February 19, 1942, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese warplanes the previous December, US President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order calling for the displacement of one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese Americans to internment camps.

It took many decades for the US government to make a formal apology to the Japanese-American community. In 1988, then President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to both apologize and compensate more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps. This decision followed a commission started in 1980 to investigate the injustice that was motivated by racial prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of leadership.

May our history not repeat things like this. Lord have mercy on us and our sins.

"Lord, keep us from fearfully persecuting the innocent among us. When we are tempted to use the cultural differences of our neighbors as excuses for injustice, convict us of our error. Keep us from turning differences into discrimination. Amen."


Sources:

https://commonprayer.net/ 

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/09/210138278/japanese-internment-redress 


Photo by mark tulin on Unsplash


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