In 1941, the United States government whisked away an estimated 700 Japanese-Americans enrolled in the University of California system and placed them—along with some 120,000 others of the same ethnicity—in internment camps. About 300 of those students came back and eventually received the degrees they were working on before their internment.
Now, by setting up a task force charged with finding those students who were taken away, California's university system is making sure the rest also receive their degrees, the California Aggie reports.
"The task force was set up to figure out how we should recognize these people," said UC-Davis Professor Daniel Simmons, who is the chairman of the task force. "These folks were our students at UC, and their relationship was severed by what is now considered an unjust act. This is an opportunity to restore justice in the grove of academia."
The Los Angeles Times reports that roughly one dozen former students have been located, and the search continues for more.
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