Remembrance of Fred Korematsu
Posted by Wes Bradford
on Jan 28, 2014
Roger Schamp introduced the story of Fred Korematsu and then showed a video of his life story, which won 2 Emmy Awards.
Fred Korematsu (1919–2005) was one of many Japanese-American citizens living on the West Coast at the onset of World War II. Shortly after the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War and his military commanders to remove everyone of Japanese ancestry from designated “military areas” near the West Coast (where it was feared they would aid the enemy in case of invasion) and place them in internment camps inland.
Korematsu instead became a fugitive, but was arrested on a street corner in San Leandro on May 30, 1942, after being recognized as a “Jap”, and was convicted in Federal Court of evading the order. The American Civil Liberties Union selected Korematsu for a test case challenging this policy in the courts. On appeal, the legality of the internment order was upheld by the US Supreme Court in Korematsu v United States, holding that compulsory exclusion, though constitutionally suspect, is justified during circumstances of “emergency and peril”.
After the war, he married and had 2 children, but never discussed his “criminal” conviction until his daughter heard about it in school and asked him about it. In 1980, a special commission appointed by President Carter to investigate the internment of Japanese-Americans concluded that the decision to remove these people to prison camps during World War II (with the confiscation of their property) occurred because of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”.
In the early 1980s, UC San Diego Law 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 FBI and military intelligence that Japanese-American citizens posed no security risk. These documents revealed that government lawyers had knowingly made false statements and withheld information before the Supreme Court. On review of these new findings, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned.
In 1988, Congress apologized and granted personal compensation of $20,000 to each surviving prisoner. In 1998 President Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian honor. Fred Korematsu died in 2005.