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A Japanese internment icon's
legacy
By William Fisher
NEW YORK - The Japanese-American who
waited 40 years for justice is dead.
Fred
Korematsu, hailed by many as the Rosa Parks (a
heroine of the African American civil rights
movement) of World War II, passed away Wednesday
in the northern California community of Larkspur.
He was 86.
The beginning of Korematsu's
battle began in a jail cell in Oakland,
California. It passed through defeat after defeat
in US courts all the way to the Supreme Court, and
ended with his total exoneration - and the award
of the Presidential Medal of Honor.
In
between was one of the most egregious chapters in
the history of US civil rights.
In
February 1942, following Japan's December 7, 1941,
attack on Pearl Harbor, then president Franklin D
Roosevelt authorized the internment of 120,000 US
residents of Japanese ancestry. Citizens and
non-citizens alike were shipped off to camps.
But Korematsu refused to surrender. While
his parents were sent off to internment, he was
arrested, tried, convicted and jailed. In 1944,
Roosevelt's order was upheld by the US Supreme
Court.
Enter Ernest Besig, a lawyer and
executive director of the American Civil Liberties
Union of Northern California. Besig wanted to find
a case that would test the constitutionality of
internment. He came up with Korematsu's US$5,000
bail, but the military police refused to release
him.
Instead, he was taken to a racetrack,
which was serving as a staging area for
Japanese-Americans. He slept in a horse stall and
later was sent to a camp in Topaz, Utah.
Meanwhile, his case was wending its way
through the courts, and eventually all legal
avenues had been exhausted. Internment ended in
1944, and Korematsu returned to San Francisco. He
raised a family and worked as a draftsman. But his
felony conviction kept him from getting a job at a
large firm or with the government.
Then in
1981 a legal historian, Peter H Irons, asked the
Justice Department to provide the original
documents in the case. There he discovered that
the lawyer who had argued the Korematsu case for
the government had lied to the Supreme Court.
Two years later, the case was reopened.
Korematsu was offered a pardon, which he refused.
He wanted a new trial. Soon afterward, a federal
court ruled that Korematsu had been tried based on
flawed evidence and his conviction was overturned.
Thus, Korematsu provided the coda for a
dark chapter in US legal history.
Five
years later, president Gerald R Ford decried the
internment as a "national mistake". In 1983, a
unanimous federal commission found that the
internment policies were not a matter of military
necessity, and were based on "race prejudice, war
hysteria and a failure of political leadership".
Five years later, president Ronald Reagan
called the internment a "grave injustice" and
authorized reparations of $20,000 each to
thousands of surviving internees, including
Korematsu. In 1999, president Bill Clinton awarded
Korematsu a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the
nation's highest civilian honor.
"In the
long history of our country's constant search for
justice, some names of ordinary citizens stand for
millions of souls - Plessy, Brown, Parks," Clinton
said, citing famous civil rights cases. "To that
distinguished list today we add the name of Fred
Korematsu."
The "Plessy" Clinton referred
to was Homer Plessy, a 30-year old shoemaker, who
was jailed in 1890 for sitting in the "whites
only" car of the East Louisiana Railroad.
In a sign of the racial obsessions of the
time, Plessy was described as a mix of
"seven-eighths white" and "one-eighths black".
This made him officially "black" under Louisiana
law and, therefore, required him to sit in the
"colored" car.
He took his case all the
way to the US Supreme Court, arguing that the law
was unconstitutional. The court found against him,
and it would not be until 1954 that the court
would rule that "separate but equal" would no
longer be the law of the land.
That
decision, known as Brown v Board of Education,
involved a third-grader named Linda Brown, who had
to walk one mile in Topeka, Kansas, through a
railroad switchyard to get to her all-black
elementary school, even though a white elementary
school was only seven blocks away.
Linda's
father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the
white elementary school, but the principal of the
school refused. With the help of Topeka's branch
of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), in 1951 little Linda Brown
sued the Topeka Board of Education.
At the
trial, the NAACP argued that segregated schools
sent the message to black children that they were
inferior to whites; therefore, the schools were
inherently unequal.
The case went all the
way to the Supreme Court, which said in a
unanimous 1954 ruling, "We conclude that in the
field of public education the doctrine of
'separate but equal' has no place. Separate
educational facilities are inherently unequal."
Leading Linda Brown's legal team was
Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first
black justice of the US Supreme Court.
Rosa Parks, who has been called the
"mother of the civil rights movement", was a
seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama when, in
December of 1955, she refused to give up her seat
on a city bus to a white passenger.
The
bus driver had her arrested, and she was tried and
convicted of violating a local ordinance. Her act
sparked a citywide boycott of the bus system by
blacks that lasted more than a year. The boycott
raised an unknown clergyman named Martin Luther
King, Jr, to national prominence and resulted in
the US Supreme Court decision outlawing
segregation on city buses.
For Korematsu,
however, it was deja vu all over again in April
2004, when the question before the Supreme Court
was whether US courts could review challenges to
the imprisonment of "enemy combatants" held at
Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba after the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Korematsu, then 84, filed a
friend-of-the-court brief saying, "The extreme
nature of the government's position is all too
familiar."
In the end, the Supreme Court
ruled that the Bush administration's policy of
detaining foreign nationals without legal process
at Guantanamo Bay was unconstitutional.
"There are Arab Americans today who are
going through what Japanese-Americans experienced
years ago, and we can't let that happen again,"
said Korematsu.
Dorothy Ehrlich, executive
director of the American Civil Liberties Union of
Northern California, told IPS, "If it had not been
for Fred Korematsu, the internment of Japanese
Americans during World War II - this most shameful
chapter in America's history - would have been
just a footnote in our history books."
"His actions have served to open the
hearts and minds of an entire generation. In the
aftermath of September 11, our ability to protect
civil liberties has been strengthened immeasurably
by the courageous actions of this one man, who
some 60 years ago, quietly stood up for his
constitutional rights."
(Inter Press
Service) |
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