06/15/2026
🇯🇵 During World War II the United States government forcibly relocated over 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and imprisoned them in camps across the country. Two of those camps were built in the Arkansas Delta. Most Arkansans have never heard of them.
Rohwer Relocation Center in Desha County and Jerome Relocation Center in Chicot County held over 16,000 Japanese American citizens and legal residents between 1942 and 1945. These were not enemy combatants. They were farmers, teachers, shopkeepers, and their American-born children — people who had committed no crime beyond having Japanese ancestry. They were given days to sell or abandon everything they owned, loaded onto trains, and transported to tar paper barracks in the Arkansas swamps. The summers were brutal. The winters were harsh. And when the war ended and they were released most had nothing left to go back to. The Rohwer cemetery still exists in Desha County, maintained today by the descendants of those who were imprisoned there. Jerome has almost entirely disappeared into farmland.
Two concentration camps operated in Arkansas soil during living memory and they are barely a footnote in the state's history curriculum. Drop a comment if you knew about Rohwer and Jerome — or if this is the first time you're hearing about them. 👇
