Essential California Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Tuesday, Feb. 18, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. Tomorrow is a dark day in California — and the nation’s — history. Wednesday marks the 78th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s signing of Executive Order 9066 in 1942. The order set the stage for the relocation and internment of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were American citizens living on the West Coast, during World War II. In Los Angeles, Rafu Shimpo — the Japanese-English daily newspaper based in Little Tokyo — chronicled the roundup of community leaders by the FBI and mounting fear until it printed its last issue on April 4, 1942. With the staff and publisher forcibly removed to camps, the newsroom remained vacant until they were able to resume publication after the war. Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, a poet who ran a Japanese-language bookstore in Fresno with her husband, was pregnant with her third child when the executive order was signed. By April, she and her family were enduring stifling heat in a tar-paper shack at the Fresno County fairgrounds, which had been converted into one of the state’s several assembly centers for Japanese Americans on their way to internment camps. She gave birth to her daughter Kimi over an orange crate in a converted horse stall shortly before the family was relocated to an internment camp in Arkansas. In the Bay Area, a 23-year-old Oakland-born welder refused to comply with the order, even as his family was sent to a San Bruno racetrack-turned-assembly center. Fred Korematsu changed his name to Clyde Sarah, got minor plastic surgery on his eyes to appear less Japanese and claimed to be of Spanish and Hawaiian descent. By the end of that May, he would be arrested on a San Leandro street corner and jailed in San Francisco, before being interned at a camp in Utah. Beginning with the efforts of activists in the late 1970s, Feb. 19 has come to be known as a “day of remembrance” for commemorating this ugly chapter of history. But as my colleague Gustavo Arellano recently wrote, the California State Assembly will do more than just remember this week. On Thursday, the Assembly is expected to approve a formal apology to all Americans of Japanese descent for the state’s role in policies that culminated with their mass incarceration. [Read the story: “California to apologize officially for historical mistreatment of Japanese Americans” in the Los Angeles Times] The resolution, which is expected to have Gov. Gavin Newsom’s endorsement, was introduced by Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance) and six others were co-authors. As Gustavo notes in his story, the resolution spells out California’s anti-Japanese heritage in excruciating detail, and also explicitly connects that history to the present. “Given recent national events,” the resolution states, “it is all the more important to learn from the mistakes of the past and to ensure that such an assault on freedom will never again happen to any community in the United States.”