Just before Pearl Harbor was attacked, Flora Ninomiya’s family had established a cut-flower business in Richmond. As historian Howard Zinn put it, “One Congressman [Mississippi Democrat] John Rankin] said: ‘I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps…Damn them! Let’s get rid of them now!’” The film “Blossoms and Thorns” tells this story from many points of view, including those of families in California like Ninomiya’s who owned cut-flower businesses before incarceration. The history is harrowing. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, “giving the army the power… […]
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