On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It sent approximately 70,000 U.S. citizens into internment camps for years, including a very young George Takei.
“I was five years old at the time,” recalls the actor. “It was a terrorizing morning I will never be able to forget. Literally at gunpoint, we were ordered out of our home.”
Best known for playing Mr. Sulu in the original “Star Trek,” Takei is a longtime activist whose causes have included LGBT rights and reparations for Japanese-American survivors of internment camps. In 1942, his family was sent to Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, then later to Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California. The Takeis were among thousands of Americans who lost their homes, farms, stores, cars, churches, temples and countless belongings because of xenophobia and racism.
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