Rohwer and Jerome: The WWII Incarceration Camps

In 1942 the federal War Relocation Authority built two camps in Southeast Arkansas to hold Japanese Americans forced from their homes during World War II. Rohwer, in Desha County, and Jerome, which spanned Chicot and Drew counties, were the only two of the agency’s camps in the Jim Crow South, according to the Densho Encyclopedia. At their peaks in early 1943, the two camps together held nearly 17,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans (WRA statistical report, 1946).

Most people held at Rohwer came from Los Angeles County or the San Joaquin Valley of California, by way of the Santa Anita and Stockton assembly centers (Densho). Jerome received more than 800 people directly from Hawai’i, the largest group sent to any of the camps (Densho).

Jerome was the last of the camps to open and the first to close, on June 30, 1944. Nearly 2,500 people were then moved to Rohwer (Densho), which stayed open until Nov. 30, 1945 (WRA statistical report; Densho). Within weeks, the Jerome site became Camp Dermott, a camp for German prisoners of war (Densho).

State leaders were openly hostile. In February 1943, Gov. Homer Adkins signed a land law that targeted U.S.-born Japanese Americans as well as immigrants; it was later found unconstitutional (Densho).

The Rohwer camp cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and became a National Historic Landmark in 1992. The National Park Service calls it one of only three surviving Japanese American confinement-site cemeteries in the country (NPS). A memorial marker at the Jerome site was finished in 1992 on donated land (Densho). Actor George Takei, who was incarcerated at Rohwer as a child, is featured on audio stations along a walking tour of the Rohwer site, and the World War II Japanese American Internment Museum in McGehee opened in 2013 (Densho).