Fred Korematsu
“I’ll never forget my government treating me like this. And I really hope that this will never happen to anybody else because of the way they look, if they look like the enemy of our country.” - Fred Korematsu
"I would like to see the government admit that they were wrong and do something about it so this will never happen again to any American citizen of any race, creed, or color...If anyone should do any pardoning, I should be the one pardoning the government for what they did to the Japanese-American people." - Fred Korematsu
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Fred Korematsu was born on January 30, 1919 in Oakland, California. His parents were Japanese immigrants, and growing up, Korematsu faced his fair share of racial discrimination. US military recruits turned him away, and after graduating high school, he went through a series of short-term jobs that quickly ended due to his Japanese background.
In 1942 and when Japanese Americans were ordered to be moved to internment camps, Korematsu refused the order. He went as far as getting plastic surgery on his eyes to pass as Hispanic or Hawaiian. All of his efforts failed, and he was put in jail for not following the law. There, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union approached Korematsu to bring this case to court. He was granted a $5,000 bail. After posting the bail, he was then convicted in federal court for violating military orders. As such, he was placed on a 5-year probation.
Korematsu appealed this verdict to the higher courts, and in December 1944, it went to the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, claiming that it violated the Fifth Amendment. The decision was a 6-3 vote to uphold the ruling, with the court citing that the “martial necessity arising from the danger of espionage and sabotage” made the military removal mandate not unconstitutional. Note that the case does not deem the constitutionality of internment camps but rather that military exclusion of Japanese Americans in the West Coast Military Area. Some argue these charges to be racial prejudices against Japanese Americans, as evidenced by dissenting Supreme Court justice Owen Roberts’s opinion, saying, “This is not a case of keeping people off the streets at night...it is the case of convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, based on his ancestry, and solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States''. The case’s legacy continued to come up as recently as the 2018 Supreme Court case Trump v. Hawaii, where Chief Justice Roberts disavowed the Korematsu ruling.
After WWII, Korematsu continued working as an activist, joining the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations. He worked on pressuring the US government to grant an official apology to surviving Japanese Americans and a $20,000 compensation for each surviving detainee. In 1998, President Bill Clinton granted Fred Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom, comparing his work to the likes of Rosa Parks and Homer Plessy. After the 9/11 attacks, Korematsu made a statement warning to not make the same discriminatory actions against those of Middle-Eastern descent.
Korematsu died in 2005 due to respiratory failure, but his work continues through the Fred T. Korematsu Institute to help educators and leaders educate civil and social justice. In 2010, California declared January 30th Fred Korematsu Day, the first in US History to have a day named after an Asian American
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