Commemorate Asian Pacific Heritage Month With Japanese American Internment Materials

Photo Submitted

A student acts as a teacher in the Rohwer Relocation Center grammar school in 1942. From the digital collection Land of (Unequal) Opportunity: Documenting the Civil Rights Struggle in Arkansas.

An important and difficult part of Arkansas history is the story of the two concentration camps for Japanese Americans located in the state during World War II. Of the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans removed from their homes and relocated under harsh conditions in confinement sites, more than 16,000 came through Arkansas. At least 64 percent of the relocated Japanese were American-born citizens. In keeping with the attention to complicated stories that Asian Pacific Heritage Month brings, the University Libraries Special Collections division is sharing the archives and the published works about Arkansas's role in the injustice experienced by Japanese Americans and the enduring legacy of that historical record. 

Special Collections holds more than 10 distinct archival collections related to the legal, administrative, educational and personal experiences of individuals that both worked and were held at the Arkansas internment camps: Rohwer, near present day McGehee, and Jerome, which was located near Dermott. Topic guides are available online to help researchers more fully access and explore different collections, and the Japanese American Internment in Arkansas guide is designed to help students and researchers access archives and other special collections resources related to the history of Japanese American internment and concentration camps in Arkansas during World War II. 

Since 2014, Special Collections has been a partner in Rising Above, a statewide effort supported by the Japanese American Confinement Sites program of the National Park Service. Led by principal investigator Angie Payne of the U of A's Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, the digital humanities project allows users to explore the history of Japanese American confinement sites. It encapsulates the experiences of the Americans who were forced to live there and those who worked and lived in those spaces. In addition to three-dimensional visualization, geospatial mapping of Japanese American connections around the country and interactive timelines, Rising Above provides a database of documents, photographs and digitized artifacts from cultural heritage and archival institutions across the state. 

"The University Libraries have digitized more than 1,000 archival documents and had graduate students intimately working in the collections to study, select and describe essential records to make them more discoverable and usable for researchers around the world," said Joshua Youngblood, instruction and outreach unit head for Special Collections and representative in Rising Above.

As a result of the Rising Above collaboration, the University Libraries' resources on this important area of study are now searchable and more usable for researchers alongside documents, oral histories and artifacts from the Arkansas State Archives, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the Butler Center at the Central Arkansas Library System and Arkansas State University. 

The Special Collections division is open to U of A students, faculty and staff by appointment only from 1-4 p.m. Monday through Friday.