The bus that took Sherman Kishi away from his Livingston home on May 13, 1942, was full of silence.
The frightened passengers were dressed in their Sunday best.
Kishi, his family and many of their neighbors were going to the Merced County Fairgrounds, known as the Merced Assembly Center, where for the next three months 4,669 Japanese people and many U.S citizens were held before they were relocated to an internment camp in Colorado.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, unfounded fears and hysteria of possible espionage by Americans of Japanese decent prompted president Franklin Delano Roosevelt to issue an order on Feb. 19, 1942, gave military leaders the ability to bar any person from "sensitive" areas. This order gave military leaders on the West Coast carte blanche when it came to the Japanese-American community.
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