Memorial speakers recalled his unshakeable belief that the wartime wrongs committed against Japanese-Americans needed to be overturned and his persistence in continuing the fight for justice and equality.

Born in Oakland, California, in 1919, Fred Korematsu was one of four sons of Japanese immigrants who ran a plant nursery. He was a welder working in the San Francisco shipyards in 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, laying the groundwork for the removal of all Japanese-Americans from the West Coast.

That summer more than 112,000 people of Japanese descent were evacuated from the West Coast and incarcerated behind barbed wire in concentration camps in remote, harsh regions. Many of them had been given only 72 hours to dispose of their property and to pack all their belongings into two bags per person. Two-thirds of the evacuees were citizens of the United States. Their only crime was their Japanese ancestry.

The Korematsu family was evacuated to Tanforan, an abandoned racetrack south of San Francisco, where they lived in a horse stall. Although virtually all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast complied with the order to report for transportation to the camps, Korematsu refused. “I was just living my life and that’s what I wanted to do,” he said in a 1987 interview.

“All of them (family and friends) turned their backs on me at that time because they thought I was a troublemaker,” he recalled. “I thought what the military was doing was unconstitutional. I was really upset because I was branded as an enemy alien when I’m an American.”

He traveled around, changed his draft registration card to show his race as Spanish-Hawaiian, and even underwent plastic surgery to alter his Asian features, so he could stay with his Italian-American girlfriend. On May 30, 1942, he was arrested.

In jail Korematsu was visited by Ernest Besig, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, who, unlike the ACLU as a whole, was anxious to test the constitutionality of internment. The lawyer tried to free Korematsu by posting $5,000 bail, but the military police refused to release him, sending him to join his family at Tanforan. They all ended up at a concentration camp in the desert at Topaz, Utah, where he was ostracized by his fellow inmates because he had tried to evade internment.

Korematsu was one of three young Japanese-American men who resisted the military-imposed curfew and/or evacuation. Minori Yasui, a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, was arrested, convicted, and served nine months in solitary confinement for violating the curfew. Gordon Hirabayashi, a 23-year-old math major at the University of Washington, refused to obey the curfew, to register for evacuation to a concentration camp, or to register for the draft because of his pacifist views. He never went to camp, spending nearly two years in county jails and federal prisons for his refusal to go along with the U.S. government.

Fred Korematsu was tried in a federal district court where he was found guilty of violating the military order that excluded all Japanese-Americans from the West Coast and was sentenced to five years probation. He appealed and lost in the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction by a 6-3 vote in 1944.

The majority of the court ruled that Korematsu was not excluded “because of hostility to him or his race,” but because the U.S. government was at war with Japan, and the military “feared an invasion of our West Coast.” The liberal Justice Hugo Black wrote, “we could not reject the finding of the military authorities that it was impossible to bring about an immediate segregation of the disloyal from the loyal.”  
 
History of discrimination
Japanese in the United States had faced extensive discrimination before World War II. After 1924, for example, they could no longer become citizens, buy land, or marry whites, and they were barred from even entering the United States.

Japanese residing in the United States were singled out as a target because of their race after the Japanese military attacked Peal Harbor. But racism alone did not account for this treatment. The policy of mass evacuation and incarceration was also part of a national policy of suppressing dissent from the labor movement and the struggles of oppressed minorities under the slogan of wartime unity.

Furthermore, the Pacific theater of World War II was essentially an interimperialist conflict between two capitalist powers, Tokyo and Washington, for control of markets and natural resources in East Asia. The U.S. ruling class appealed to racist prejudice against Japanese to justify the war and disguise its true character. The creation of racist hysteria against the “sneaky, dishonest, sly Japs” was necessary for the ruling class to ensure that U.S. workers would fight.

Toward the end of the war, like many of the internees, Korematsu was allowed to leave the camp and work as a welder in Salt Lake City. Later he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he worked as a structural steel draftsman. His felony conviction, however, prevented him from getting a job at a large firm or government agency.

Four decades later, in the 1980s, a lawyer and historian, Peter Irons, stumbled upon “top secret” government documents showing that officials withheld, suppressed, and altered evidence indicating that there was no military necessity to incarcerate the Japanese-Americans.

For instance, these documents revealed that the Justice Department knew there was no evidence to support the claim that people of Japanese ancestry were engaging in “extensive radio signaling and in shore-to-ship signaling” to Japanese ships. In fact, they admitted that some of the so-called “evidence of signaling” was nothing more than kids going to outdoor toilets at night with flashlights! Even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and officials in the Federal Communications Commission secretly concurred.

When Korematsu was presented with this new evidence by Irons he decided to act, even though reopening the case was a big risk. (In fact, within weeks of reopening his case, Korematsu was fired from his job.) He and Irons decided to try to overturn his conviction, along with those of Hirabayashi and Yasui. A team of young, mostly Japanese-American lawyers, whose families had also been interned during World War II, filed the appeals.

In light of the new information, in 1983 U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel threw out Korematsu’s conviction. Yasui’s conviction was vacated in 1984 and Hirabayashi’s conviction was vacated in 1987 by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 1971 Congress revoked the law under which all three had been convicted. In 1983, the Commission on Wartime Relocation condemned the internment of Japanese-Americans as “not justified by military necessity,” but motivated by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

In 1988 President Reagan called the internment “a grave injustice” and signed a Congressional bill authorizing reparations of $20,000 each to the 56,000 surviving internees. In 1998, Korematsu was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.

In the years after the decision, Korematsu spoke around the country about the lessons learned from the U.S. concentration camps during World War II. At first he was reluctant to speak because he thought “he was not educated or eloquent enough to express himself,” as Karen Kai, one of his lawyers, said at the memorial meeting. “But audiences always responded to his genuineness and he came to enjoy the experience.”

“There are Arab-Americans today who are going through what Japanese-Americans experienced years ago, and we can’t let that happen again,” said Korematsu in a 2001 documentary film detailing his fight, “Of Civil Wrongs and Rights.” Korematsu died on March 30 at age 86.  
 
 
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