I have driven on Catalina Highway en route to Mt. Lemmon near Tucson many times. Each time, I’ve seen the sign for the Gordon Hirabayashi Campground that is part of the Coronado National Forest. It has always been an anonymous name for me, to a certain extent, as I’ve never looked into who this man was.

A week or two ago, a coworker was telling me how she spent one of her weekend days hiking the Prison Camp Trail near where the internment camp used to be. “Internment camp(?), you mean as in a WWII Interment Camp?” Mr. Hirabayashi, as it turns out, was a second-generation Japanese-American student at the University of Washington in the 1940s.He was convicted of violating the curfew aimed at Japanese-Americans that had been implemented by Executive Order 9066 during WWII. The Supreme Court subsequently upheld the conviction. Gordon eventually ended up in the internment camp located in the Catalina National Forest in what is now the Gordon Hirabayashi Campground. (See Visit the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation site (former WWII prison camp).

This conversation reminded me of a digital collection on The Library of Congress’ American Memory website, which exhibits Ansel Adams’ Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at the Manzanar War Relocation Center.  Adams donated over 200 prints and negatives to the collection, named the “Suffering under a Great Injustice”: Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar.

The exhibit includes the photographs, a short discussion about the legal evolution of the prison camps, Adams’ work at the camp, as well as resources for teachers. For librarians, the exhibit includes a description of the cataloging process and metadata.

Well worth checking out.