FDR'S UIGHURS:

The year was 1944. A playoff series between two all-star baseball teams generated ample excitement. Gila River fought Heart Mountain in thirteen games to win the series. The players described it as exhilarating. But the players taking part in this all-American pastime did so in dire circumstances. Gila River and Heart Mountain were both Japanese incarceration camps--previously known as internment camps--and these athletes were among the tens of thousands of Japanese Americans imprisoned there. [...]

"Without baseball, camp life would have been miserable," said George Omachi, a prisoner who later became a scout for Major League Baseball. Leagues formed in seven incarceration camps. Of those camps, four had teams that were permitted to travel to each other, at the expense of the prisoners. While baseball took their minds off of imprisonment, it also asserted their identity as Americans and located them within American culture.

Japanese American baseball has its roots in the 1903 creation of the Fuji Athletic Club of San Francisco. By 1910, there were so many Japanese American baseball teams that the Japanese Pacific Coast Baseball League was formed, with teams in eight large cities on the West Coast. These leagues were segregated, similar to Negro Leagues that had begun to form in the late 1800s, and were founded long before baseball was integrated in the mid-1900s. Before Japanese Americans were allowed to play in Major League Baseball, there were the Nebraska Nisei, the Tijuana Nippons, the San Fernando Aces, and the San Pedro Gophers, among others. Those early teams of Japanese Americans laid the foundation for Travis Ishikawa of the San Francisco Giants to play Jeremy Guthrie and Nori Aoki of the Kansas City Royals in the 2014 World Series. [...]

Ten incarceration camps held 120,000 people, imprisoning them based on their ethnicity and revoking their citizenship. But those prisoners were still American. One prisoner, Takeo Suo, likened donning a baseball jersey to wearing the U.S. flag. They took part in the great American pastime, even as the U.S. government imprisoned them and questioned their place in America.

In the middle of the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, there's a monument dedicated to the 442nd Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army, which was composed of Nisei, second-generation Japanese American soldiers in World War II.

Named after the regiment's motto -- "Go For Broke" -- the inscription on the monument reads in part, "Looked upon with suspicion, set apart and deprived of their constitutional rights, they nevertheless remained steadfast and served with indomitable spirit and uncommon valor, for theirs was a fight to prove loyalty."

In his excellent new book, Facing the Mountain, Daniel James Brown tells the story of the men of the 442nd and their families, who "through their actions, laid bare for all the world to see what exactly it means to be an American." It's a fascinating account of some of the bravest Americans who ever lived, and a sobering reminder of a dark chapter in American history -- years of anti-Asian racism that, as we're reminded daily, never really went away.

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