Los Angeles Times

USC students explore civil rights, national security in university's first history class on WWII internment

LOS ANGELES - University of Southern California faculty member Susan Kamei was struck by discomforting moments of deja vu during the 2016 presidential campaign.

As some calls rose for restrictions on Muslims and Arab Americans, purportedly to protect national security, Kamei thought of her parents. Exactly 76 years ago Monday, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the incarceration of Kamei's parents and about 120,000 others of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, after Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

Kamei had helped right that wrong as a legal advocate for the successful 1988 effort to win an apology and monetary reparations from the U.S. government to those incarcerated. But after President Trump's

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