[31] His daughter was born in 1950, and a son, Ken, in 1954.[32]. Many Japanese residents living on the West Coast cooperated with the government internment order, hoping to prove their loyalty as Americans, including members of the Japanese American Citizens League. He appealed again and brought his case to the United States Supreme Court, which granted review on March 27, 1944. [21] On June 12, 1942, Korematsu had his trial date and was given $5,000 bail (equivalent to $78,238.29 in 2019). Fred T. Korematsu, who lost a Supreme Court challenge in 1944 to the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans but gained vindication decades later when he was given the Medal of Freedom, died on Wednesday in Larkspur, Calif. Mr. Korematsu, who lived in San Leandro, Calif., was 86. He found work repairing water tanks in Salt Lake City, but after three months on the job, he discovered he was being paid half of what his white coworkers were being paid. On December 19, 2017, the New York City Council unanimously passed a resolution establishing January 30 annually as Fred T. Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution. Besig decided to take Korematsu's case despite this. Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu (January 30, 1919 – March 30, 2005) was an American civil rights activist who objected to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. I was an American citizen, and I had as many rights as anyone else.". Mr. Korematsu agreed to sue. He then found a new job, but was fired after a week when his supervisor returned from an extended vacation to find him working there. He spent two years at an internment camp in Utah with his family. [44], In 2018, in Trump v. Hawaii, the Supreme Court expressly declared that Korematsu's case was wrongly decided. [29] Peter Irons said that Korematsu "felt responsible for the internment in a sort of backhanded way, because his case had been lost in the Supreme Court. [1] However, Korematsu's conviction for evading internment was overturned four decades later in US District Court, after the disclosure of new evidence challenging the necessity of the internment, evidence which had been withheld from the courts by the U.S. government during the war. [41] Discussing racial profiling in 2004, he warned, "No one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. On November 10, 1983, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of U.S. District Court in San Francisco formally vacated the conviction. The amici curiae’s statement of interest emphasized the similarity of the unlawful detainment of Fred Korematsu during World War II and that of Jose Padilla following the events of 9/11, and warned the American government of repeating mistakes of the past. Attorneys Arturo J. Gonzalez and Sylvia M. Sokol of Morrison & Foerster LLP, and Jon B. Streeter and Eumi K. Lee of Keker & Van Nest LLP, worked on the amicus curiae brief. Fred Korematsu Day, 1/30/2014, Topaz Japanese-American Relocation Center Digital Collection, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fred_Korematsu&oldid=981241069, Burials at Mountain View Cemetery (Oakland, California), Overturned convictions in the United States, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, The Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at the, Fred T. Korematsu Elementary School at Mace Ranch in. He was arrested on a street corner in San Leandro on May 30, 1942, and held at a jail in San Francisco. [11] Instead, he trained to become a welder in order to contribute his services to the defense effort. First, he worked as a welder at a shipyard. Daniels, Roger. In the brief, Korematsu warned the Supreme Court that the restriction of civil liberties can never be justified, and had never been justified in the history of the United States. [c], However, the Court also decided Ex parte Endo in December 1944 to grant Mitsuye Endo her liberty from the camps because the Department of Justice and War Relocation Authority conceded that Endo was a "loyal and law-abiding citizen" and that no authority existed for detaining loyal citizens longer than necessary to separate the loyal from the disloyal. [22] Korematsu was tried and convicted in federal court on September 8, 1942, for a violation of Public Law No. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy.". He went in one day to find his timecard missing; his coworkers hastily explained to him that he was Japanese so therefore he was not allowed to work there. In December 1944 in Korematsu v. the United States, the Supreme Court upheld internment by a vote of 6 to 3. Korematsu thus reacted critically to the administration of President George W. Bush, who imprisoned detainees in Guantanamo Bay by restricting their civil liberties albeit in a time of, according to the respondent, "military necessity. Mr. Korematsu maintained that his constitutional rights were violated by internment and that he had suffered racial discrimination. [13] Korematsu underwent plastic surgery on his eyelids in an unsuccessful attempt to pass as a Caucasian, changed his name to Clyde Sarah[14][15] and claimed to be of Spanish and Hawaiian heritage. These documents revealed that the military had lied to the Supreme Court and that government lawyers had willingly made false arguments. [23] As an unskilled laborer, he was eligible to receive only $12 per month (equivalent to $187.77 in 2019) for working eight-hour days at the camp. In recent years, Mr. Korematsu expressed concern about civil liberties in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The resolution's main sponsor was Council Member Daniel Dromm of Queens. "[36] He also urged others to "protest, but not with violence, and don’t be afraid to speak up. Awards in his name include the American Muslim Voices Korematsu Civil Rights Award. President Bill Clinton awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, to Korematsu in 1998, saying, "In the long history of our country's constant search for justice, some names of ordinary citizens stand for millions of souls: Plessy, Brown, Parks ... to that distinguished list, today we add the name of Fred Korematsu." It provided financial redress of $20,000 for each surviving detainee, totaling $1.2 billion. There is a Korematsu bronze relief in front of the San Jose Federal Building. They did not intend to stay, but decided to after Kathryn became pregnant with their first child, Karen. [16], When on May 3, 1942, General DeWitt ordered Japanese Americans to report on May 9 to Assembly Centers as a prelude to being removed to the internment camps,[b] Korematsu refused and went into hiding in the Oakland area.
He became a central figure in the controversy over the wartime removal of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese immigrants from the West Coast to inland detention centers. He believed that "full vindication for the Japanese-Americans will arrive only when we learn that, even in times of crisis, we must guard against prejudice and keep uppermost our commitment to law and justice. "[34] He also said, "If anyone should do any pardoning, I should be the one pardoning the government for what they did to the Japanese-American people. He hoped that with his altered appearance and identity he could avoid ostracism when he married his girlfriend, who had an Italian background. The Fred T. Korematsu Institute was founded in 2009 to carry on Korematsu's legacy as a civil rights advocate by educating and advocating for civil liberties for all communities. [20], Korematsu felt that "people should have a fair trial and a chance to defend their loyalty at court in a democratic way, because in this situation, people were placed in imprisonment without any fair trial". [2] Finally, the Korematsu ruling itself was formally overruled seventy-four years later in Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. ___ (2018). On September 23, 2010, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California signed into law a bill that designates January 30 of each year as the. 503, which criminalized the violations of military orders issued under the authority of Executive Order 9066, and was placed on five years' probation. After Korematsu's arraignment on June 18, 1942, Besig posted bail and he and Korematsu attempted to leave. In 1944, the A.C.L.U. "[40], From 2001 until his death, Korematsu served on the Constitution Project's bipartisan Liberty and Security Committee. ", Similarly, in his second amicus brief, written in April 2004 with the Bar Association of San Francisco, the Asian Law Caucus, the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area, Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach and the Japanese American Citizens League, Korematsu responded to Donald Rumsfeld v. Jose Padilla. "Every day in school, we said the pledge to the flag, 'with liberty and justice for all,' and I believed all that. In the early 1980s, while researching a book on internment cases, lawyer and University of California, San Diego professor Peter Irons came across evidence that Charles Fahy, the Solicitor General of the United States who argued Korematsu v. United States before the Supreme Court, had deliberately suppressed reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and military intelligence which concluded that Japanese-American citizens posed no security risk. The cause was a respiratory ailment, said Don Tamaki, a lawyer for Mr. Korematsu.
When President Bill Clinton presented Mr. Korematsu with the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, in January 1998, the president likened him to Linda Brown and Rosa Parks in the civil rights struggles of the 1950's. U.S. Census, January 1, 1920, State of California, County of Alameda, enumeration district 145, p. 12-A, lines 29–33. Mr. Korematsu had undergone plastic surgery in an effort to disguise his Asian features and had altered his draft registration card, listing his name as Clyde Sarah and his background as Spanish-Hawaiian. In the summer of 1942, he was found guilty in federal court of ignoring the exclusion directive and was sentenced to five years' probation. Fred T. Korematsu, who lost a Supreme Court challenge in 1944 to the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans but gained vindication decades later when he was given the Medal of Freedom, died … "I didn't feel guilty because I didn't do anything wrong," he told The New York Times four decades later.

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