February 19, 1919
A Pan-African Congress was organized by W.E.B. DuBois in Paris, France, to coincide with the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I. The Congress’s aim was to call the issue of “international protection of the natives of Africa” to the attention of the United States and the European colonial powers who were making momentous decisions on the nature of the post-war world.
February 19, 1942
Ten weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any or all people from military areas “as deemed necessary or desirable.” The military in turn defined the entire West Coast, home to the majority of Americans of Japanese ancestry or citizenship, as a military area. By June, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to remote internment camps built by the U.S. military in scattered locations around the country, where they were imprisoned for the next two and a half years.
