Korematsu, Fred (1919-2005), became a leading figure in the civil rights struggles of Japanese Americans during World War II (1939-1945). In 1942, Korematsu, a 23-year-old California-born son of Japanese immigrants, was arrested for defying the United States government’s forced internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans. Korematsu challenged the government’s policy in a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court of the United States . In 1944, the court ruled against Korematsu, stating that it was legal for the government to forcibly detain persons of Japanese heritage during the war. The court overturned the ruling in 2018, 13 years after Korematsu’s death.
The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor , Hawaii, in December 1941, caused great shock and fear throughout the United States. Many Americans came to view people of Japanese descent in the United States as potentially dangerous and disloyal. In February 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the military to remove more than 110,000 Japanese immigrants and their U.S.-born children from their homes in the Pacific Coast States and Arizona.
Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born on Jan. 30, 1919, in Oakland , California. His parents were Japanese immigrants who operated a plant nursery business in Oakland. As a young adult, Korematsu registered for the draft. However, he did not qualify to join the military for medical reasons at that time, because he had an ulcer. He became a ship welder. As tension between the United States and Japan mounted in late 1941, he was fired from his job. He believed that he had been fired because of his Japanese ancestry. In the spring of 1942, Korematsu ignored Roosevelt’s order that sent his family and thousands of other Japanese Americans to internment camps in the Western United States.
Korematsu made several efforts to avoid internment. He underwent minor plastic surgery to try to hide his ethnicity. He also lived under a fake name and claimed Spanish and Hawaiian descent. In May 1942, police arrested Korematsu on the suspicion that he was Japanese. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, who believed the internment policy was unconstitutional, agreed to take Korematsu’s case. In September, Korematsu was convicted under a federal law that made it a crime to defy the executive order. He was sent to live with his family in internment camps in California and Utah.
In late 1942, authorities granted Korematsu temporary leave to work outside the internment camp. He received an indefinite leave in early 1944. Korematsu and his lawyers continued to appeal his conviction until the case reached the Supreme Court. In December 1944, in the case Korematsu v. United States, the court ruled that the government was within its rights to remove persons of Japanese ancestry from areas threatened by Japanese attack during the war.
Korematsu later returned to California and worked as a drafter—that is, a maker of technical drawings. In 1983, a legal team filed a petition for a writ (formal written order) that would reverse the earlier decision based on an error in fact. It charged the U.S. government with presenting false information about Korematsu’s case during its arguments in the 1940’s. Later in 1983, a Congressional commission stated that the government’s internment policies toward Japanese Americans had been a result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” A federal judge vacated (legally canceled) Korematsu’s criminal conviction in November 1983. Korematsu soon began working as an activist for civil rights issues.
In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the highest civilian honor awarded by the president of the United States. Korematsu died on March 30, 2005, in Marin County, California. In 2010, the state of California recognized Korematsu by naming January 30 as “Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.” In the following years, a number of other states joined California in honoring Korematsu’s civil rights legacy on January 30—his birthdate. In June 2018, the Supreme Court overruled its 1944 Korematsu decision. Chief Justice John Roberts , speaking for the majority, said that “the forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority.”
