The 2006 Northern California Time of Remembrance program sponsored by local chapters of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 18 at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts, located at 1020 O Street, at the corner of 10th and O Streets in downtown Sacramento.

The event will be a community-wide remembrance of Executive Order 9066, which suspended due process and removal of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry into America’s concentration camps during World War II.

The Feb. 18 program will include guest speaker Professor and Author Eric L. Muller, one of America’s foremost authorities on the parallels between the World War II internment of Japanese Americans and the threats to civil rights after 9/11.

Muller teaches constitutional and criminal law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.  Muller joined the UNC faculty in the fall of 1998.  He has published articles in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review.  His book “Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters of World War II,” was published in August of 2001 by the University of Chicago Press.

The moderator will be Washington Assemblywoman Sharon Tomiko Santos.

JACL chapters from Placer County, Sacramento, Florin, Lodi, Marysville and Stockton host the Fourth Annual “Time of Remembrance” program to observe the 64th Anniversary of President Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066.

“Justice is a matter of continuing education – for seven weeks, beginning Jan. 16 through March 3, more than 6,000 students from northern California will participate in education programs at the California Museum of History, Women and the Arts,” said a spokesperson.

“Students will have an opportunity to hear first-hand stories from Japanese Americans who were in the internment camps and served in the military.  Students will learn that although the strongest protection for human rights is fundamental in our democratic nation, mistakes are made.”