Posted
on January 30, 2014
Today
we honor Fred Korematsu for saying “No.”
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| These horse stalls were used for temporary internment. Of U.S. citizens. Who had broken no laws. |
The
United States did a horrifying thing in the wake of the
also-horrifying Pearl Harbor attack. Because the U.S. was attacked by
Japan, and was then at war with Japan, it rounded up more than
110,000 Japanese Americans – most of them U.S. citizens, many of
them people who had never even been to Japan – just in case they
were disloyal or Japanese spies. People lost their homes, their
businesses, many of their possessions. They were imprisoned in “War
Relocation Camps,” more commonly referred to as internment camps.
Eventually,
American presidents and governmental commissions decided that the
internment was wrong. Eventually, it was decided that the denial of
U.S. citizens of their property and their rights was done on the
basis of "race prejudice”
and “war hysteria” – and internment survivors and their heirs
were awarded more than $1.6 billion in reparations.
So
let's get back to Fred Korematsu. He was born here in he U.S., in
Oakland, California, on this date in 1919. When Pearl Harbor was
attacked and war broke out between the U.S. and Japan, Korematsu was
rejected by the U.S. Navy because he had stomach ulcers. So he became
a welder so he could help with the defense effort by working in a
shipyard.
One
day he found that he was fired because he was “a Jap,” and
therefore couldn't be trusted. Korematsu got another job, but was
fired a week later when the owner of the company realized that
somebody had hired “a Jap.”
Shortly
after losing all employment, the order came that all people “of
Japanese descent” report to Assembly Centers so that they could be
organized and sent away to camps. Korematsu took the extreme action
of having plastic surgery on his eyelids in the hopes of looking like
a white man, changing his name, and NOT complying with the order.
But
someone recognized him as being Japanese, and Korematsu found himself
arrested. The ACLU approached Korematsu and asked if he would stand
trial as a test of the legality of the Japanese American internment,
and Korematsu agreed. He lost in court, appealed the decision, lost
again, and spent most of the war in prison and in an internment camp
in Utah. Many people, including many Japanese American people,
disdained Korematsu for his opposition to the government. Some of the
Japanese Americans had cooperated in hopes that they were proving
their loyalty to the U.S. in so doing – and they found Korematsu's
opposition threatening to those hopes. So Fred Korematsu felt as
alone surrounded by other wronged Japanese Americans as he did in
prison.
When
the war and the internment were over, Korematsu continued to oppose
the very real discrimination against Japanese Americans. And he
widened his scope and began to speak out against all racism.
Vindicated
at last!
Finally,
in 1983, Fred Korematsu's conviction was overturned in court after he
gave a stirring and powerful speech as his ending statement. Some
people in the courtroom likened that speech to Martin Luther King's
famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
In
1998 President Bill Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S. He also was
awarded several other more local honors, including being Grand
Marshal of a parade and having an elementary school and a street
named after him.
In
2001, after the tragic attack we call 9/11, Korematsu spoke out
against U.S. governmental actions against people of Middle Eastern
descent. He warned that what happened to his people should never
happen to anyone again, and he warned against acting against a race
or religion or ethnicity because of fear.
Until
his death in 2005, at age 86, Korematsu continued to work on civil
rights, serving on the Constitution Project, speaking out, and
writing amicus
briefs for court cases.
On
September 23, 2010, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a
bill that designates today as Fred
Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.
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