Fred Korematsu presents Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) with a photo of himself with Rosa Parks, taken by Shirley Nakao, at an Asian Law Caucus dinner in San Francisco in 2003. Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against giving the president unlimited war-making authority in 2001.
By MICHELLE TIO
Established in 2010, Fred Korematsu Day (Jan. 30) honors Japanese American civil rights hero Fred Korematsu.
Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu lived in California during rising anti-Japanese sentiment due to Japan’s involvement in World War II. After the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, and under the guise of a response to “national security threats,” President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066.
This executive order gave military officials the unprecedented authority to “exclude” civilians from soon-to-be created “military areas” and to “force compliance.” Military officials quickly targeted people of Japanese descent, forcibly removing over 120,000 ethnic Japanese from their homes and placing them in concentration camps.
Despite the threat of criminal penalties for disobedience, Fred Korematsu resisted incarceration. In early May of 1942, Korematsu’s family complied with the military’s order to leave their home and report to a “relocation center,” but Fred did not. He had eyelid surgery in an attempt to disguise his Japanese features, changed his name to Clyde Sarah, and altered his ethnicity on a government document to Spanish Hawaiian.
On May 30, 1942, Korematsu was recognized and arrested. American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Ernest Breg visited Korematsu in jail, asking him to become the subject of a test case against Japanese American incarceration. Korematsu agreed, decades later saying, “I didn’t feel guilty because I didn’t do anything wrong. Every day in school, we said the pledge to the flag, ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ and I believed all that. I was an American citizen, and I had as many rights as anyone else.”
On Sept. 8, 1942, Korematsu was convicted of violating military orders. He maintained his innocence and appealed his conviction while living in a concentration camp in Utah. His case made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him in December 1944, stating that Japanese “exclusion” was justified due to suspicion of Japanese “disloyalty” to the United States and the “military urgency” of segregating “all citizens of Japanese ancestry” from the West Coast.
Forty years later, historian Peter Irons and researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga discovered intelligence documents. These documents, which the U.S. government had concealed from the Supreme Court during the time of Korematsu’s 1944 hearing, asserted that people of Japanese descent were not military threats and mass incarceration was not justified. Because of these documents, Korematsu’s case was reopened.
On Nov. 10, 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned, with Judge Marilyn Hall Patel stating that the military necessity justification used in the 1944 Supreme Court decision was based on “unsubstantiated facts, distortions, and representations of at least one military commander, whose views were seriously infected by racism.”
After his conviction was overturned, Korematsu continued to fight. He lobbied for an official apology from the U.S. government regarding the incarceration and monetary compensation for survivors; traveled across the country to educate people about his experiences; and after 9/11, advocated for the human rights of Muslim inmates held at Guantanamo Bay.
On March 30, 2005, Korematsu passed away at the age of 86 due to respiratory failure. Five years later, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill 1775, which designates Fred’s birthday, Jan. 30, as Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.
The bill states, “Fred Korematsu’s lifelong pursuit of justice on his own behalf and for countless others is uniquely symbolic of the founding ideals and traditions of our state and nation. He remained a tireless advocate for, and is an enduring symbol of, every American’s right to liberty, due process, and equality without regard to race, ethnicity, or national origin.”