In 1967, Karen Korematsu was a 16-year-old high school junior when she learned that Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes during World War II and incarcerated in concentration camps.
She was stunned that this could happen in the U.S.: people losing their property, their jobs, their homes, their dignity, not knowing where they were going or when they would come back.
One man resisted the military orders, landing himself in jail under federal criminal charges that would lead to the landmark Supreme Court case, Korematsu v. The United States.
He lost; the court upheld his conviction.
“Oh, that’s my name,” Karen recalled saying to herself. “The only thing I knew was that Korematsu is a very unusual Japanese name.”
It wasn’t until later that night that she could ask her father about it.
He acknowledged he was the same Korematsu from the Supreme Court case, saying only that it had happened a long time ago, that what he did was right and that the government was wrong.
“I could see this hurt going over his face,” Karen said, “and I couldn’t ask him any more questions.”
It would be another 20 years before the U.S. government acknowledged that Fred Korematsu was not guilty of a crime. But even as he cleared his name, the U.S. has never backed down on its assertion that it can incarcerate its own citizens under the banner of “military necessity.”
As the U.S. marks 250 years of independence amid travel bans, detention centers and fights over what students can read, the Korematsu case continues to inform who is allowed to belong in America and whose exclusion the law will tolerate — in spite of the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection.
From citizen to “enemy”
Fred T. Korematsu didn’t set out to make history.
Long before his name was attached to a Supreme Court case, Fred was a welder in Oakland, California, the son of Japanese parents who immigrated to America in 1905.
“He had a girlfriend. He had a job … When the United States entered World War II, he tried to enlist. The government changed his draft classification to ‘alien enemy’ although he had been born in this country, although he was a U.S. citizen,” said Dale Minami, the civil rights attorney who would later lead the team that reopened Fred’s case.
On Feb. 19, 1942, months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It authorized the forced removal of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to “relocation centers” — impacting more than 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, whether there was any evidence of potential disloyalty to the U.S. or not.
Fred, then 23, refused that order. For years, some interpreted that as selfish; he didn’t want to be separated from his girlfriend and he wanted to exercise his right to be free.
He was a young man in love, said Lorraine Bannai, who also worked on his legal team and is now professor emerita at Seattle University School of Law.
“He stayed with the woman he loved in the place that had always been his home,” Bannai said, “which was absolutely a right he had, like every other American.”
He was arrested and jailed for refusing the order, then imprisoned for the duration of WWII at Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. Meanwhile, his case went through the federal system: first to a district court, which found him guilty of violating military orders and sentenced him to five years’ probation, then the U.S. Court of Appeals, which agreed with the original ruling. By the time his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices had upheld similar wartime restrictions in cases brought by Japanese Americans Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui.
Fred’s conviction was upheld in a 6-3 ruling. The justices argued that his incarceration was justified by the extraordinary needs of wartime, framing it as a response to fears of espionage and sabotage — not race.
Reopening the case
Decades passed. Fred focused on raising his family, working two jobs to support them as he faced employment and housing discrimination. He said almost nothing about the case.
Then, in the 1980s, legal historian and attorney Peter Irons and Japanese American activist Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga were doing research on how Japanese Americans were treated during World War II in incarceration camps.
Herzig-Yoshinaga found the original version of the Final Report of General DeWitt, a key document that undercut the military’s later argument that it didn’t have time to investigate the loyalty of Japanese Americans. Instead, in the original report, DeWitt wrote, “It was not that there was insufficient time in which to make such a determination…[I]t was simply a matter of facing the realities that a positive determination could not be made, that an exact separation of the ‘sheep from the goats’ was unfeasible.”
Irons discovered a Department of Justice memo, in which the DOJ acknowledged that what it was about to tell the court about the military’s justification for the removals was untrue.
Irons drove to Fred’s front door.
Fred read the documents in silence and, as Karen tells it, looked up and said something to the effect of: “I’ve been waiting for this.”
Bannai, who as a young lawyer volunteered with the team that reopened the Korematsu case, remembers a Fred who was ready.
“I don’t think there was trepidation about reopening his case,” said Bannai, who is also the author of “Fred Korematsu, Enduring Conviction: Fred Korematsu and His Quest for Justice.” “He didn’t want the press camped out on his front lawn. But he wanted to do it.”
Coram nobis, which is Latin for “before us” is a post-conviction petition that asks a court to reopen a criminal case on the ground that the original proceedings were tainted by government misconduct or fraud.
The legal team filed its petition in federal district court in San Francisco.
In 1983, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel vacated Fred Korematsu’s conviction on the ground that the government had lied to the Supreme Court.
Fred was no longer a criminal in the eyes of the government. After his victory, he remained active in advocating for human rights and speaking up for equal protection.
In 1998, Fred was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor by then-President Bill Clinton. He died in 2005 at age 86, and today, seven states mark Jan. 30, his birthday, as Fred Korematsu Day.
But the 1944 Supreme Court decision remained.
“It exonerated Fred,” Bannai said. “It erased his conviction from the books. What it didn’t do and people are confused about, is that it did not say that the incarceration was unconstitutional.”
‘History is now’
The danger of this precedent is still very real today, Bannai said.
“Number one, the court, based on Korematsu in a long line of cases, says we don’t have much of a role on issues of national security,” she said. “Number two, the government is constantly redefining what national security means. National security, of course, we understand — national security means wars, foreign wars, wars where soldiers are shooting at each other. But does it mean a war on drugs? Does it mean shooting boats?”
Its shadow hung over 2018’s Trump v. Hawaii, in which Hawaii and other states argued that President Trump’s travel bans went beyond his powers as president and were motivated by Islamophobia. Writing for the conservative majority, Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t agree and said Trump had a “sufficient national security justification.”
That provoked a sharp dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who called the decision the same “dangerous logic” as what was used in Korematsu. Roberts replied that Korematsu had nothing to do with Trump’s travel bans, adding that the removal of Japanese Americans to concentration camps was “objectively unlawful.”
Some hailed that as long-awaited justice: acknowledgement from the Supreme Court that the WWII incarceration was unconstitutional. Bannai and other legal scholars weren’t ready to celebrate.
“One thing is clear: the Court’s opinion itself shows it did not overrule one of the most dangerous aspects of Korematsu—the proposition that courts should step aside and defer to the government’s actions whenever the government claims that they are justified by national security,” she wrote in a 2018 article.
In April, Minami, who led the team that reopened Korematsu, spoke at Manzanar National Historic Site several hours north of Los Angeles. Thousands of people trek to the former incarceration camp every year as part of an annual pilgrimage.
Minami himself was born at a Japanese hospital in Boyle Heights; Japanese doctors weren’t allowed privileges at other Los Angeles hospitals. His family had been incarcerated at Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas before he was born.
As he honored the people who endured the camps during WWII, he pointed to President Trump’s use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to send undocumented immigrants to detention centers.
“ICE acting as a private army to the president of the United States,” Minami said. “It’s almost a practice run for the future of this country. It’s just like the Census Bureau in 1942, which collaborated illegally to identify where Japanese were and where they lived.”
Minami was joined by Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Greater L.A. Council on American-Islamic Relations, who emphasized no one is safe when one community is targeted.
“Yesterday, it was Japanese Americans accused of disloyalty,” he said. “Today, it’s immigrants and refugees portrayed as invaders. It’s Muslims labeled as a national security threat and subjected to surveillance, discrimination and bans. It’s Black and brown communities that are over-policed and under-protected.”
Karen Korematsu has dedicated her life to carrying her father’s message into classrooms and courthouses across communities as founder and CEO of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute.
“This is not just something in the past. History is now,” she told The LA Local.
“And we continue to make the same mistakes because we don’t know our shared history. Whether you’re African American, whether you’re Latino, whether you are Indigenous, a Muslim — it all ties in together,” she said. “I say that our struggles for justice really are the same.”
Despite all the challenges that remain, Karen finds hope in the future through the youth she encounters.
“I always emphasize to students to also learn about their own stories. How did their families come to America? What were those struggles?” she said. “Because once you know those struggles, you can appreciate other people’s struggles.”
Published as part of a national effort by local newsrooms to reflect on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. You can see coverage from other newsrooms by clicking here
