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| 1941–42 |
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| U.S. secretary of war removed about 120,000 Japanese citizens as well as noncitizens from the West Coast to detention camps in seven states of the Rocky Mountains region. Evacuees were forced to leave behind valuable property and endured the deprivation of their civil and human rights. The U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned the use of racial criteria and the removal process in Hirabayashi v. U.S. (1943) and Korematsu v. U.S. (1943), but modified its decision in ex parte Endo in Dec. 1944. Still, Japanese Americans remained interned until Jan. 1945. | 1 |
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| 1941 |
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| African Americans formed a March on Washington movement and demanded an end to racial discrimination in defense industries. Fearing an interruption of the war effort, FDR issued Executive Order 8802, establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Nearly a million blacks served in the armed forces during World War II. They made up about 10 percent of all service men and women. | 2 |
| Native Americans supported the war effort by contributing to Red Cross campaigns, and in the case of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, in New York, declaring war on the Axis powers. Moreover, nearly 30,000 Native Americans joined the armed forces. A special unit of Navajos gained widespread recognition when they used their language to develop secret communications that confused the Japanese. | 3 |
| Mexican Americans gained defense jobs in growing numbers and also joined the armed forces in disproportionately large numbers. As recognition of the increasing importance of Hispanic Americans, FDR appointed Carlos Castaneda of the University of Texas to serve as special assistant on Latin American affairs and as assistant to the chairman of the Fair Employment Practices Committee. The Spanish-speaking people's division of the Office of Inter-American Affairs also worked to ease discrimination against Hispanic Americans. | 4 |
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| Jan. 8 |
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| President Roosevelt appointed a four-person Office of Production Management to coordinate defense activities. | 5 |
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| March 11 |
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| The Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, empowering the president to provide goods and services to those nations whose defense he deemed vital to the defense of the U.S. | 6 |
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| May 27 |
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| President Roosevelt proclaimed an unlimited state of national emergency. | 7 |
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| June 16 |
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| The government ordered German consulates throughout the country closed. Three days later the German and Italian governments asked that U.S. consulates in Axis-controlled areas of Europe be closed. | 8 |
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| Aug. 14 |
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| THE ATLANTIC CHARTER. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, representing the United States and Great Britain, issued a joint declaration of peace aims. They announced that their countries sought no aggrandizement, desired no territorial changes contrary to the wishes of the people concerned, respected the right of nations to choose their form of government, and wished to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to peoples who had been forcibly deprived of them. They likewise favored equality of economic opportunity with access to essential raw materials for all nations; they sought to promote friendly collaboration among the peoples of the world, fair labor standards, social security, freedom from fear and want, free traverse on the high seas, the abandonment of force, and the disarmament of aggressor nations. | 9 |
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| Aug. 18 |
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| President Roosevelt signed a bill permitting the army to keep men in service 18 months longer. | 10 |
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| Sept. 20 |
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| A revenue measure designed to provide for defense expenditures of $3,553,400,000 became law. | 11 |
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| Sept. 24 |
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| Fifteen governments (nine in exile) endorsed the Atlantic Charter. | 12 |
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| Nov. 6 |
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| The U.S. extended a $1 billion lend-lease credit to the Soviet Union. | 13 |
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| Nov. 10 |
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| The National Defense Mediation Board ruled against John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers of America in the captive coal-mine dispute, but the UMW soon won a closed-shop agreement (Dec. 7). | 14 |
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