Last month marked the 80th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order to intern tens of thousands of Japanese Americans in 10 camps across six states. Here in Colorado, his action incarcerated the likes of a young boy named Ken Kitajima, who just a few years later, risked his life for the United States in the Korean War.

Decades later, in an American age when much debate is had on how to properly put our history into perspective, Coloradans across the spectrum can unite in recognizing the recent addition to our national park system of our state’s World War II-era Japanese-American internment center in the southeast corner of our state. It’s a historic site we can agree is of the raw, unmanicured form that best teaches present and future generations about the sins of the past.

The long-overdue national historic-site designation for Camp Amache – a 600-acre site about a mile outside Granada in Prowers County – came March 18. The President Joe Biden-signed, bipartisan Amache National Historic Site Act ensures the remaining relics and stories of the camp, where more than 7,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned from 1942 to 1945, won’t be lost to history.

Our state’s schoolkids should take field trips to a place where they’ll see firsthand a relatively recent case study that soberly informs them of how otherwise freedom-loving leaders and communities can lose sight of their guiding principles.

As such, Camp Amache, known as the Granada War Relocation Center while in operation, must forever stand as that ominous reminder of what happens when portions of our population dehumanize fellow citizens out of unfounded fear. It’s tribal dread that is the embarrassing inverse of our nation’s creed: “… one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Kudos for the designation is owed to former Colorado Republican U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard of Greeley, who proposed national historic-site designation in 2006. But long before Allard led the charge to protect the site, it was a Colorado leader from an earlier generation, Republican Gov. Ralph Carr, who in the thick of World War II publicly opposed Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans post-Pearl Harbor.

While other governors of Western states supported the internments, Carr opposed depriving citizens of their basic rights based solely on their racial background or the citizenship of their ancestors.

Carr’s words are as important now, in our increasingly race-obsessed society, as they were 80 years ago when he said, to the displeasure of many Colorado farmers, “If a majority may deprive a minority of its freedom … you as a minority may be subjected to the same ill will of the majority tomorrow.”

Ironically, at Roosevelt’s magnum opus memorial in our nation’s capital, the following FDR quote is etched in stone: “We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.”

FDR’s words reflect a touchstone principle, of course – though his commitment to that principle does seem suspect in hindsight. By contrast, there’s little room for doubt about Carr’s commitment. His advocacy for racial tolerance and constitutional rights of Japanese Americans is generally thought to have cost him his political career.

“If you harm them, you must first harm me,” Carr said of the internees. Maybe there’s a stone that sentence can be etched into at the newly designated Amache historic site.

Colorado Springs Gazette editorial board