September 18, 1942

The Rohwer Relocation Center in Desha County, one of two World War II–era incarceration camps built in the state to house Japanese Americans, opened. The Japanese-American population, of which sixty-four percent were American citizens, had been forcibly removed from the West Coast of the United States under the doctrine of “military necessity” and incarcerated in ten relocation camps in California and various states west of the Mississippi River. This marked the largest influx of any racial or ethnic group in the state’s history.