States of Incarceration is coming to Wilmington, NC
States of Incarceration is coming to the University of North Carolina Wilmington! Stay tuned for more information and a new local story!
States of Incarceration is coming to the University of North Carolina Wilmington! Stay tuned for more information and a new local story!
During World War I, the federal government imprisoned German civilians living in the United States in internment camps, one of which was in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Between 1917 and 1920, this camp housed more than 3,600 people. Most of them had committed no crime. They were simply not American citizens. Among the challenges these imprisoned people faced were a flu pandemic as well as separation from their families and property.
A century later, non-citizens are incarcerated in Georgia at the Stewart Detention Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prison in Lumpkin, Georgia. For most of the detained people, their only crime was coming to the United States. While awaiting asylum hearings, they are subjected to civil and human rights abuses, and, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic.
These sites represent bookends of a century in which the United States incarcerated non-citizens, depriving them of their freedom and civil and human rights.
Our Point of View
We are students in the Kennesaw State University public history program. Our studies focused on the incarceration of non-citizens in Georgia at two locations—Fort Oglethorpe, where German nationals were imprisoned during World War I, and the Stewart Detention Center, where asylum-seekers are held in one of the country’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisons. Most of us were unaware of the realities that incarcerated non-citizens faced, both 100 years ago and today.
Freedom. Everybody has it; everybody talks about it in this country—but YOU don’t have it.
— Erich Posselt, German national interned at Fort Oglethorpe, 1918
Join the Museum of History and Holocaust Education and CivicGeorgia for a Welcoming Week conversation about legislative turning points in U.S. immigration history as well as the ebb and flow of welcoming and exclusion in the American experience.
The session will begin with a review of key moments in the history of immigration and citizenship policy in the United States along with the social, political, and economic context that led to changes. Participants will then join a break-out room for a facilitated discussion focused on one of the pre-selected themes (listed below) that run through this history.
Virtual event.