Fred Korematsu Quotes

In 1984, Fred Korematsu went back to federal court, seeking to have his conviction voided retroactively on the theory that the government had withheld crucial facts from the judiciary. The court agreed with him. The Department of Justice and the Army, it found, had distorted the record to make it appear that there was a legitimate security concern.113 A few years later, Congress granted reparations of twenty thousand dollars to each Japanese-American who had been interned.

Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born in Oakland, California, on January 30, 1919, to parents who ran a flower nursery. After graduating from high school, he worked as a shipyard welder until, like Mitsuye Endo, he lost his job after Pearl Harbor. When the order for relocation came, Korematsu ignored it, unwilling to leave his Italian American girlfriend. He was arrested in May 1942. While awaiting trial, he was visited in jail by an attorney with the California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The California ACLU was looking for someone for whom it could file suit to test the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066.

Gordon Hirabayashi was held without bail for five months, until, at his trial, a jury found him guilty after deliberating for all of ten minutes. Min Yasui was convicted by a federal judge and sentenced to a year in prison and a $ 5,000 fine, the maximum under the law. Yasui was then held in solitary confinement in the county jail for nine months, denied exercise periods, showers, and a haircut. Fred Korematsu was also quickly found guilty and sent to the concentration camp in Topaz, Utah. Later, he would say, “I didn’t feel guilty because I didn’t do anything wrong … Every day in school, we said the pledge to the flag, ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ and I believed all that. I was an American citizen, and I had as many rights as anyone else.