Pledge of Allegiance at Raphael Weill Elementary School, San Francisco

In 1942, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Dorothea Lange was hired by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to document the government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps in California. She photographed these young girls at a school in San Francisco’s Japantown just days before the military removed people from their homes. The U.S. government suppressed a majority of Lange’s WRA photographs, which were never seen publicly until after the end of World War II.