Angelou didn’t only unmask inequality by becoming a human rights activist, she also railed against wars, specifically World War II and the Cold War. A crucial part of World War II was the Japanese assault on the United States in Pearl Harbor :
Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was a major US naval base … On 7th Dec. 1941 The base was attacked by 353 Imperial Japanese fighter planes, bombers, and torpedo planes … All eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four sunk, over 2,000 died. The following day, December 8, the United States declared war on Japan (Stout).
The aftermath of this bombing, aside from it ushering the United States entrance to World War II it guided for the misplacement of Japanese Americans to internment camps generated by Executive Order 9066 : “Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942, which allowed regional …show more content…
resulted in the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans” (Stout). The segregation and movement of the Japanese to these camps is witnessed in Angelou’s memoir :
In the early months of World War II… On the surface it appeared to be totally peaceful and almost a refutation … The Yakamoto Seafood Market quietly became Sammy’s Shoe Shine Parlor and Smoke Shop … The Asian population dwindled before my eyes … Especially in view of the fact that they (the blacks) had themselves undergone concentration camps (177 - 178).
The Executive Order 9066 outgrew to the Japanese being diminished before her eyes verifying the historical, and emotional impact it had on Angelou. Angelou plays with irony via the application of the word peaceful to describe the feeling of the times. While satirizing American society’s belief that they are promoting peace