On 25 April 1942, Japanese Americans formed a long line to enter the Japanese American Citizens League auditorium at 2031 Bush Street in San Francisco. The Library of Congress catalogue for Dorothea Lange's photograph identifies it as a registration line before removal to wartime incarceration camps.
This was not a queue for a desired product or event. It imposed order on the process by which residents were identified and displaced because of ancestry. The line's outward neatness did not make the policy just. It records the way a deprivation of rights could be administered as ordinary counter-by-counter procedure.