Day of Remembrance

High School projects yield varying results. The best that can be said about the bad ones is that they consume time that students might spend doing something destructive. The good ones inspire students, enrich their understanding of the world, and give them the tools and drive to change it.

Some of those good ones even warrant display outside the school grounds.

“If They Came For Me Today: The Japanese American Internment Project,” a new exhibit at the San Francisco Main Public Library, was developed by Community Works with students at George Washington, Balboa, and Horace Mann schools in San Francisco as a way for the students to understand and explore the Japanese American mass-incarceration and honor those who were imprisoned in the wartime concentration camps.

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President Bush on Dec. 21 signed into law legislation providing for the preservation of historically significant confinement sites where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II, the Japanese American National Heritage Coalition announced.

The National Park Service will administer the $38 million grant program. Non-federal organizations selected by the Interior Department will receive grants for historical research and restoration.

The sites include the 10 camps operated by the War Relocation authority: Manzanar and Tule Lake in California, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas, Topaz in Utah, Minidoka in Idaho, Amache in Colorado, Heart Mountain in Wyoming.

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