NPR

George Takei got reparations. He says they 'strengthen the integrity of America'

Eighty years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order that sent thousands of Japanese-Americans to internment camps. Actor George Takei was among them.
A sign reading 'I AM AN AMERICAN,' on the Wanto Co grocery store in Oakland, California on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The store was closed and the Matsuda family, who owned it, was relocated and incarcerated under the US government's policy of internment of Japanese-Americans.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It sent approximately 70,000 U.S. citizens into internment camps for years, including a very young George Takei.

"I was five years old at the time," recalls the actor. "It was a terrorizing morning I will never be able to forget. Literally at gunpoint, we were ordered out of

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