Fred Korematsu
Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu (born January 30, 1919 in Oakland , California , † March 30, 2005 in Larkspur , California) was an American civil rights activist of Japanese descent. Through his decades of legal struggle against his ethnically-based internment in World War II and for rehabilitation, which led to the cassation of his conviction from the war in 1983, and through honoring several US states and the American President, he became a symbol of the memory of the unjustified Internment of Japanese-born Americans during the war and for the fight against arbitrary or otherwise questionable state imprisonment in general.
Life
Origin and Fate in World War II
Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born in 1919 as the third of four children to Japanese immigrants in Oakland, California . His parents ran a floriculture business.
After the USA entered World War II , he volunteered for the National Guard and Coast Guard , but was turned down because of his Japanese ancestry.
Korematsu then trained as a welder and was employed as such at a shipyard in Oakland, where he rose to the position of foreman . One day, however, he was released without notice because of his Japanese origins.
Following the announcement of Executive Order 9066 issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the internment of Japanese Americans in February 1942, Korematsu decided to disobey the order and go on with his life in freedom by going into hiding. He had his creases operated on to look less Asian, called himself Clyde Sarah, and claimed to be Hispanic-Hawaiian ancestry.
On May 30, 1942, he was arrested on the street in San Leandro and taken to a county jail in San Francisco . There he was visited by Ernest Besig , the head of the San Francisco office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Besig offered to Korematsu to make his case a test case for the constitutional challenge to the entire internment practice of Japanese Americans.
On September 8, 1942, Korematsu was sentenced by a federal court for disobeying the military orders of Executive Order 9066 . Part of the verdict was a five-year probationary period. For several months he was imprisoned in a temporary storage facility in San Bruno in the greater San Francisco area on a converted racecourse, the so-called Tanforan Assembly Center . After all, he was with his family in the in the state of Utah located Topaz War Relocation Center , spent one of ten internment camps for Japanese-people in the US.
During his incarceration, Korematsu's Italian-born fiancée finally broke up with him; The reason she gave in a letter was the fear that their own ethnic origin could also be disadvantageous for both of them. During the war, the US also interned about 3,000 Italian-born Americans and immigrants.
Beginning in November 1942, Korematsu, like many other prisoners who were fit for work, was granted relief and allowed to live and work outside the camp. In January 1944 his detention in the camp was finally suspended indefinitely.
Defeat before the US Supreme Court in 1944 (Korematsu v. United States)
Korematsu appealed his conviction and internment and sued the United States Supreme Court on all levels . Korematsu was finally defeated there in December 1944. The court ruled with a majority of 6 to 3 judges' votes that Korematsu's imprisonment was not due to racism, but was justified by the information provided by the military that Americans of Japanese origin had radio communications with enemy ships from the US mainland and were prone to apostasy. The imprisonment was therefore a "military necessity".
In one of the three minority votes, Judge Robert H. Jackson noted that there was no evidence of incarceration and wrote:
"The court has declared the principle of racial discrimination in criminal matters and for forced relocation to be valid for all time ... This principle is now there like a loaded weapon, at the hand of every authority that can make an urgency plausible."
And Jackson's counterpart Frank Murphy wrote in his dissent on the warrant:
"[He] crosses the cliff of constitutional power and falls into the ugly abyss of racism."
Also in the press, the sentence was partially severely criticized and thus in the Washington Post , with the headline Legalized Racism (Legalized Racism) headline. However, this did not correspond to the majority opinion of the Americans. In a Gallup poll in December 1942, only 35% of those questioned were in favor of the Japanese deported eastwards from the Pacific coast being allowed to return after the war.
After the war
After the end of the war and the release of the Japanese-born US population from camp detention, Korematsu tried to regain a foothold as US citizens. He moved to Detroit in the state of Michigan , where already one of his brothers lived. There he met his South Carolina native , future wife Kathryn, whom he married shortly thereafter. In Michigan this marriage was possible; however, many other states still had laws banning "multiracial" marriages in place at the time, including both South Carolina and California, where the couple moved in 1949 to settle in the San Francisco Bay Area .
Korematsu's career opportunities were permanently impaired by the conviction. For several decades he hardly spoke about his memories; his children learned of the history of the internment of Japanese Americans in school.
Proceedings resumed in 1983
In 1980, the United States Congress established by law a special commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding the internment of Japanese-born Americans during World War II, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). In June 1983 it came to the conclusion that the decisions to intern these people in camps were the result of “racist prejudice, war hysteria and a lack of political leadership”.
During this time, the political scientist Peter Irons of the University of California, San Diego and the researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga discovered secret documents from the US Department of Justice, from which it emerged that this had already been published in 1943 and 1944 by various investigative agencies and intelligence agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) J. Edgar Hoovers and the Navy Intelligence Service, the Office of Naval Intelligence , had been informed that no wrongdoing by Japanese Americans had been found. These official reports were deliberately never submitted to the US Supreme Court by the Department of Justice; in one case the report was burned.
On this basis, i. H. Government malpractice, reached a team of pro bono workers; H. A retrial in the case of free lawyers Korematsu's criminal case that had led to his conviction 40 years earlier. On November 10, 1983, the District Federal Court for Northern California in San Francisco, presided over by Judge Marilyn Hall, overturned Patel Korematsu's 1942 conviction. In the grounds of the judgment she wrote:
"[The case] Korematsu stands as a constant warning that in times of war or alleged military necessity, our institutions must be vigilant in protecting the rights guaranteed by the constitution."
After rehabilitation
After his conviction in 1942 was overturned, Korematsu actively campaigned for the enforcement of redress claims for Americans who had previously been imprisoned for their Japanese origin. President Ronald Reagan , who was initially opposed to these claims, finally gave in under political pressure and signed a law in August 1988 to compensate those affected and to excuse the state power against them.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 , Korematsu repeatedly campaigned publicly and as an amicus curiae against the courts for terrorism suspects who were victims of the legally questionable detention practices introduced after the attacks. In a 2003 letter to the US Supreme Court regarding the cases of two Muslim prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base detention center , he said that the government's excessive security measures were reminiscent of the past. He sent a similar letter in 2004 in the case of a Muslim American who was in solitary confinement in a US military prison without trial.
Korematsu made similar statements in April 2004 together with various law and civil rights organizations on the case of terrorist suspect José Padilla . The signatories of the letter stressed the similarities between Padilla's illegal imprisonment after September 11, 2001 and that of Fred Korematsu during World War II, and warned the US government against repeating the mistakes of the past.
Korematsu, who last lived in San Leandro , died on March 30, 2005 at the age of 86 in Larkspur of a respiratory disease.
Revocation of the Supreme Court ruling 2018
Unlike criminal conviction Korematsus remained the decision of the US Supreme Court in 1944 against Korematsu that the constitutionality of the internment of Japanese-born Americans by Executive Order 9066 had confirmed further valid until 2018th It is considered one of the worst decisions the institution made. In 2014, Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia joined the ranks of those who condemned the decision, but warned:
“You are fooling yourself if you think it won't happen again ... I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen again in wartime. That's no justification, but it's reality. "
In 2018, the decision was finally made in the Trump v. Hawaii explicitly revoked. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority:
" Korematsu was seriously wrong on the day of the decision, has already been revoked in the court of history, and - to be clear - has no place in any law under the constitution."
honors and awards
On January 15, 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the highest civilian honor awarded by the President. In June of that year he was awarded the California Senate Medal of the California Senate and the Pearlstein Civil Rights Award of the Anti-Defamation League .
Fred Korematsu received honorary doctorates from several universities and faculties , including the City University of New York Law School , the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law , California State University, East Bay and the University of San Francisco . The Faculty of Law, Seattle University has a Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality .
In 2010, California declared January 30th by law to be Fred Korematsu Day , the first time in the United States to name a memorial day for an American of Asian descent. Since then, several other states have also legally designated the day as the memorial day named after Korematsu, including Hawaii , Utah , Illinois , Georgia and Virginia .
On January 30, 2017, Korematsu's 98th birthday, the Internet search engine Google dedicated a Google Doodle to him .
literature
- Karen Alonso: Korematsu v. United States: Japanese-American internment camps . Enslow, Springfield (New Jersey) 1998, ISBN 978-0-295-74281-6 (English, 128 pages).
- Lorraine K. Bannai: Enduring Conviction: Fred Korematsu and His Quest for Justice . University of Washington Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-295-80629-7 (English, 312 pages, preview on Google Books ).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c d e Richard Goldstein: Fred Korematsu, 86, Dies; Lost Key Suit on Internment. In: nytimes.com . April 1, 2005, accessed February 3, 2018 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Fred T. Korematsu. Fred T. Korematsu Institute, accessed February 3, 2018 .
- ↑ a b c d e Erick Trickey: Fred Korematsu Fought Against Japanese Internment in the Supreme Court ... and Lost. In: smithsonianmag.com . January 30, 2017, accessed February 3, 2018 .
- ↑ Trump v. Hawaii, on the Supreme Court website, accessed May 13, 2020
- ↑ a b Lifetime Awards. Fred T. Korematsu Institute, accessed February 3, 2018 .
- ^ About the Center. Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, School of Law, Seattle University , accessed February 4, 2018 .
- ↑ Frances Kai-Hwa Wang: Virginia to Celebrate Korematsu Day for First Time. In: nbcnews.com . January 27, 2016, accessed February 3, 2018 .
- ^ Tara John: Google Doodle Honors Fred Korematsu, Activist Who Fought US Internment of Japanese Americans. In: time.com . January 30, 2017, accessed February 3, 2018 .
- ↑ Fred Korematsu's 98th Birthday. In: Doodles Archive. Google , January 30, 2017, accessed April 8, 2019 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Korematsu, Fred |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Korematsu, Fred Toyosaburo (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American civil rights activist of Japanese descent |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 30, 1919 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Oakland , California |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 30, 2005 |
| Place of death | Larkspur , California |