Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu ( ???? , Korematsu Toyosabur? , January 30, 1919 - March 30, 2005) is an American civil rights activist who objected to the American Japanese's introduction during World War II. Shortly after the Imperial Japanese Navy launched its attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of individuals from Japanese ancestors living on the West Coast from their homes and their mandatory prisons in the internment camp, but Korematsu instead challenged orders and became a fugitive.
The legality of internal orders was upheld by the United States Supreme Court at Korematsu vs. United States ; this verdict was never explicitly overthrown. Korematsu's conviction to avoid detention was canceled four decades later after the disclosure of new evidence challenging the need for detention, evidence that has been detained from court by the US government during the war.
To commemorate his trip as a civil rights activist posthumously, "Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution" was observed for the first time on his 92nd birthday, January 30, 2011, by the state of California, the first warning for Asian Americans in the United States. By 2015, Virginia passed a law to make it the second and first commonwealth that permanently recognizes every January 30 as Fred Korematsu Day.
The Fred T. Korematsu Institute was founded in 2009 to continue the legacy of Korematsu as a civil rights advocate by educating and advocating civil liberties for all communities.
Video Fred Korematsu
Biography
Initial life
Fred was born in Oakland, California, in 1919, the third child of four brothers from Japanese parents, Kotsui Aoki and Kakusaburo Korematsu, who immigrated to the United States in 1905. Fred lived in Oakland from his birth until his capture. He attended public schools, participated in tennis teams and swam at Castlemont High School (Oakland, California), and worked in his family's flower nursery near San Leandro, California. She experienced racism in high school when an officer recruited the US Army to distribute recruiting leaflets to non-Japanese Korematsu friends. The officer told Korematsu, "We were ordered not to accept you." Even the parents of his girlfriend, Ida Boitano, the Italians feel that people of Japanese descent are inferior and unworthy to associate with whites.
World War II
When summoned for military service under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, Korematsu was rejected by the US Navy for heartburn. Instead, he was trained to become a welder to donate his services to defense efforts. First, he works as a welder in a shipyard. He goes in a day to find his time card lost; his colleagues hurriedly explained to him that he was Japanese so he was not allowed to work there. He later found a new job, but was fired after a week when his boss returned from a long vacation to find him working there. Because of Japanese descent, Korematsu lost all work completely after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
On March 27, 1942, General John L. DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense Area, forbade Japanese Americans from leaving Military Area boundary no. 1, in preparation for their eventual evacuation to the internment camp. Korematsu underwent plastic surgery in his eyelids in an unsuccessful attempt to graduate as Caucasian, changing his name to Clyde Sarah and claiming to be a Spanish and Hawaiian heritage.
When on May 3, 1942, General DeWitt ordered the Japanese Americans to report on May 9 to the Assembly Center as early as to be transferred to the internment camp, Korematsu refused and hid in the Oakland area. He was arrested at a street corner in San Leandro on May 30, 1942, and was held in a prison in San Francisco. Shortly after Korematsu's arrest, Ernest Besig, director of the American Civil Liberties Society in northern California, asked him if he would be willing to use his case to test the legality of Japan's American detention. Korematsu agreed, and was assigned to civil rights lawyer Wayne M. Collins. But the national ACLU in fact argued for Besig, his own district director, not to fight the Korematsu case, as many of the ACLU's high members were close to President Roosevelt and the ACLU did not want to be seen negatively during the war. Besig decided to take the Korematsu case despite this.
Korematsu felt that "people should have fair trials and an opportunity to defend their loyalty in court in a democratic manner, because in this situation, people are placed in prisons without a fair trial". On June 12, 1942, Korematsu had a trial date and was given $ 5,000 bail (equivalent to $ 74,887.98 in 2017). After the Korematsu indictment on June 18, 1942, Besig sent a guarantee and he and Korematsu tried to leave. When encountered by military police, Besig told Korematsu to go with them. Military police brought Korematsu to the Presidio. Korematsu was tried and convicted in federal court on September 8, 1942, for violation of Public Law no. 503, which criminalizes violations of military orders issued under the authority of Executive Order 9066, and placed on a five year trial period. He was taken from the courtroom and returned to Tanforan Assembly Center, and afterwards he and his family were stationed at the Central Utah War Remnants Center in Topaz, Utah. As a manual laborer, he is entitled to receive only $ 12 per month (equivalent to $ 179.73 in 2017) to work eight hours a day in the camp. He was placed in a horse stall with a single light bulb, and then said "prison is better than this".
Some praised, but others criticized, Korematsu's actions. Many Japanese residents living on the West Coast cooperate with the government's internal order, hoping to prove their loyalty as Americans, including members of the American Citizen League. Korematsu is underestimated because of its opposition to government orders, and is even seen as a threat to many Japanese Americans. When the Korematsu family was transferred to Topaz's intern camp, he later remember feeling isolated because his imprisoned colleagues recognized him and many, if not most of them felt that if they talked with him, they would also be seen as troublemakers.
Korematsu subsequently appealed to the US Court of Appeals, which gave a review on March 27, 1943, but upheld the original verdict on January 7, 1944. He appealed again and brought his case to the United States Supreme Court, which gave a review on 27 March. , 1944. On December 18, 1944, in the decision of 6-3 made by Judge Hugo Black, the Court held that the compulsory exception, though constitutionally suspect, was justified during "emergency and danger" circumstances.
However, the Court also ruled in December 1944 to allow Mitsuye Endo his freedom from the camps because the Justice Department and the War Relocation Authority acknowledged that Endo was a "loyal and law-abiding citizen" and that there is an authority available to hold faithful citizens longer than necessary to separate the faithful from infidelity. The Endo case did not answer the question of whether the initial dismissal was constitutional, as was the case with Korematsu.
Life and compensation later
After being released from camp in Utah, Korematsu had to move east because the law would not allow former internees to return west. He moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where he continued to fight against racism. He still knows there is inequality among the Japanese, because he experiences it in everyday life. He found a job repairing a water tank in Salt Lake City, but after three months of work, he found he was paid half the salary of his white co-worker. He told his boss that this was unfair and asked to be paid the same amount, but his boss only threatened to call the police and try to get him arrested just because he was Japanese, so he left his job. After this incident the Korematsu lost hope, remained silent for over thirty years. Her own daughter did not know what her father did until she was in high school. Peter Irons said that Korematsu "feels responsible for surveillance in a fraudulent way, because his case has been lost in the Supreme Court." He moved to Detroit, Michigan, where his younger brother lived, and where he worked as a draftsman until 1949. He married Kathryn Pearson in Detroit on October 12, 1946. They returned to Oakland to visit his family in 1949 because his mother was ill. They did not intend to stay, but decided to after Kathryn was pregnant with their first child, Karen. His daughter was born in 1950, and a son, Ken, in 1954.
In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed a proclamation that officially ended the 9066 Executive Order and apologized for the alienation, stating, "We now know what we should know at the time - not only is the evacuation wrong but the Japanese-Americans are and Faithful Americans.On the battlefield and at home, the names of Japanese-Americans have been and continue to be written in history for the sacrifices and contributions they have made to the well-being and for this security, our common State. "In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed a special commission to investigate the Japanese-American internment during World War II, which concluded that the decision to remove Japanese descendants to prison camps was due to "race prejudice, war hysteria, and failure of political leadership." In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the 1988 Civil Liberties Act sponsored by Representatives Norman Mineta and Senator Alan K. Simpson. It provides $ 20,000 in financial compensation for every surviving prisoner of $ 1.2 billion.
In the early 1980s, while researching a book on internment cases, lawyers and the University of California, San Diego professor Peter Irons found evidence that Charles Fahy, US Attorney General who presented Korematsu vs. The United States, in the presence of the Supreme Court, has deliberately pressed reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and military intelligence which concluded that Japanese-Americans posed no security risk. These documents reveal that the military has lied to the Supreme Court, and that government lawyers are willing to make the wrong argument. Irons concluded that the decision of the Supreme Court was invalid because it was based on unassigned assertions, distortions and mispresentations. Together with a team of lawyers led by Dale Minami, Irons petitioned for a report of the mistake of coram nobis with federal court, attempting to overturn Korematsu's conviction.
On November 10, 1983, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the US District Court in San Francisco formally vacated the belief. Korematsu testified before Judge Patel, "I want to see the government recognize that they are wrong and do something about it so that this will never happen to any American citizen of any race, creed, or color." He also said, "If anyone has to forgive me, I must be the one who forgives the government for what they do to the Japanese-Americans." Peter Irons explains the final statement of Korematsu during the case as the most powerful statement he has ever heard from anyone. He found statements as empowering as Martin Luther King's speech, Jr. "I have a Dream". Judge Patel's decision cleared the name of Korematsu, but was unable to overturn the Supreme Court decision.
President Bill Clinton awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, to Korematsu in 1998, saying, "In the long history of continuous search for our country's justice, some common citizen names stand for millions of souls: Plessy, Brown, Parks... to that honorable list, today we added the name of Fred Korematsu. "That year, Korematsu served as Grand Marshal of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival festival in San Francisco.
A member and Elder of the First Presbyterian Church in Oakland, Korematsu twice president of San Leandro Lions Club, and for 15 years volunteers with the American Scout, San Francisco Bay Council.
Korematsu spoke after September 11, 2001, about how the government of the United States should not let the same thing happen to people of Middle Eastern descent like what happened to Japanese Americans. When detainees were held in Guantanamo Bay for a long time, in Korematsu's opinion, he submitted two briefings to the Supreme Court and warned them not to repeat the mistakes of Japanese detention.
He wrote the first of these amicus in October 2003 because two cases of appeals before the United States Supreme Court, Shafiq Rasul v. George W. Bush and Khaled AF Al Odah v. United States of America. Attorney Arturo J. Gonzalez and Sylvia M. Sokol from Morrison & amp; Foerster LLP, and Jon B. Streeter and Eumi K. Lee from Keker & amp; Van Nest LLP, working on the amicus curiae brief . In short, Korematsu warned the Supreme Court that limiting civil liberties could never be justified, and never justified in the history of the United States. Furthermore, Korematsu gives examples of specific cases in American history where the government transcended constitutional powers, including the Alien and Sedition Acts 1798 and the Japanese detention of World War II. Korematsu later reacted critically to the administration of President George W. Bush, who imprisoned detainees at Guantanamo Bay by limiting their civil liberties even though in time, according to the respondents, "military needs."
Similarly, in the second report of amicus , written in April 2004 with the San Francisco Bar Association, the Asian Legal Caucus, the Asian Bar Association of the Great Gulf Region, the Pacific Islands of Asia Rule and the League of Japanese Americans, Korematsu responded Donald Rumsfeld v. Jose Padilla. The following lawyers worked on a brief amicus : Geoffrey R. Stone and Dale Minami of Minami, Lew, and Tamaki LLP; Eric K. Yamamoto, Stephen J. Schulhofer of the Center for Justice Brennan; and Evan R. Chesler of Cravath, Swaine & amp; Moore LLP. An interesting amici curiae statement emphasizes the similarity of Fred Korematsu's unlawful detention during World War II and Jose Padilla after 9/11, and warns the American government of repeated mistakes in the past. He believes that "full justification for Japan-America will arrive only when we learn that, even in times of crisis, we must guard against prejudice and keep our commitment to law and justice."
From 2001 until his death, Korematsu served on the bipartisan Freedom and Security Committee of the Constitution Project. Discussing racial profiling in 2004, he warned: "Nothing can be locked simply because they share the same race, ethnicity or religion as spies or terrorists.If that principle is not learned from the Japanese American intern, it is time which is very dangerous for our democracy. "
Postmortem
Fred Korematsu died of respiratory failure at his daughter's home in Marin County, California, on March 30, 2005. One of the last things that Korematsu said was, "I will never forget my government treated me like this, and I really hope it will never it happens to others because of the way they look, if they look like the enemy of our country. "He also urges others to" protest, but not violently, and do not be afraid to speak.one can make a difference, even if it takes four twenty years. " Korematsu is buried in Mountain View Cemetery.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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