The Black Lives Matter protests that have followed the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police officers remind Margaret Burnham of 1968. At that time, the national response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. combined with ongoing protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War to plunge an already divided nation more deeply into turmoil.
“This is taking place in a world that is not only deeply fractured, but also deeply fragile because of the coronavirus, the economic crisis that makes the country look a little bit like 1929, and the existential threat of climate change,” says Burnham, university distinguished professor of law at Northeastern. “It’s everything collapsing all around us.”
The dissenting opinion raised the fact that the Japanese American people were being deprived of their civil liberties and of their civil rights. They were taken from the homes they lived in, their businesses they owned were closed down, and were put into camps and not able to return. Many of the people died.
