February 19 · This Day in America
Ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066. It names no people. It does not have to. Within months more than 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent — two-thirds of them American citizens, many of them children — are tagged like luggage and moved behind barbed wire in the desert. They had committed no crime. They lost homes, farms, businesses, years. Some sons left the camps to fight and die for the country that imprisoned their families, and they fought brilliantly. The Supreme Court let it stand. It would take until 1988 for the United States to say, in law, that this was wrong, and pay a measure of redress to the survivors who remained. We tell this one straight, because the 250th is the whole story — and because a free country has to be able to look at the days it failed its own.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1807
Three years after killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, former Vice President Aaron Burr is arrested in the Alabama wilderness, accused of plotting to carve an empire out of the American West. The trial, presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall, would set a deliberately high bar for treason in the new republic — proof that even the powerful could be charged, and that the charge must be proven.
Source: www.history.com