President John D. Welty participated in the dedication ceremony Oct. 6, of the remodeled Fresno Assembly Center Memorial at the Fresno Fairgrounds.
The memorial was dedicated in the memory of the 5,344 Japanese-Americans held at the fairgrounds assembly center from May to October in 1942 before being sent to relocation camps across the United States.
Groundbreaking for the project began July 7 and the first two phases of the memorial, a storyboard wall with photos and stories from internees, are completed.
In May 2010, Fresno State conferred honorary degrees upon Japanese-American alumni whose college careers were disrupted by internment ordered for people of Japanese descent two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Six of those alumni and the descendants of 20 others who were enrolled at Fresno State in late 1941 and early 1942 came to campus for a special Commencement ceremony to receive honorary Bachelor of Humane Letters degrees under the California State University’s Nisei Diploma Project.
To read more about the historic Commencement, click here.
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