Tag Archives: Fred Korematsu

The danger of being Japanese-American in 1942

The Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah, where Fred Korematsu was sent after his arrest (National Archives)

On this day in 1942, a man named Fred Korematsu was walking with his girlfriend down a street in San Leandro, California, when he was stopped by police.  He was arrested for something that, at the time, was illegal: being of Japanese descent on the West Coast of the United States.  Just a few months earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had issued Executive Order 9066, which ordered  that all people of Japanese ancestry — even native-born American citizens — on the West Coast of the United States were to be rounded up and put in concentration camps.  120,000 people were removed from their homes and placed in “relocations centers” scattered around the western and central United States.  But Fred Korematsu didn’t report for “relocation.”  And his arrest would spark one of the most infamous Supreme Court decisions in our nation’s history.  Learn more in our film, Korematsu and Civil Liberties.

 

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Commemorate Fred Korematsu Day, Learn About this Civil Rights Hero

January 30th is Fred Korematsu Day. Mr. Korematsu was a national civil rights hero. He was one of only a handful of Asian Americans who challenged the government’s efforts to incarcerate Japanese Americans from the West Coast in internment camps during World War II. At the age of 23, Mr. Korematsu was arrested and eventually convicted for defying the government’s order to leave California. Undeterred, he appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1944, in a decision that remains a stain on the Court’s legacy, the Court ruled against him. As Associate Justice Stephen Breyer declares in our film,  Korematsu and Civil Libertiesit is “universally acknowledge that that was an error.” Watch our film and learn more about Mr. Korematsu and his fight for justice.

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