daigo.org RSSFred Korematsu
I got an alert e-mail from JACL and learned for the first time about Fred Korematsu. (He passed away yesterday). He fought against internment camp in 1944 and lost, but gained vindication almost 40 years later and was given the Medal of Freedom. Following is directly taken from JACL’s press release. Other good read about him are: PBS TV documentary’s storyline and website called My Hero Project
Born in Oakland, CA, Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was twenty-two when America entered World War. By 1942 he had tried twice to enlist in the army but was rejected due to a physical disability. After Executive Order 9066 was issued in February, all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were first subject to curfews and then ordered to leave the military exclusion zones and placed in internment camps, but Korematsu refused to leave and was arrested. He then challenged the internment order as it applied to him — a loyal American citizen — in court but was found guilty of knowingly violating the exclusion order. Korematsu was confined in an internment camp in Utah while he appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court. In 1944, Korematsu lost his case in a highly-charged legal opinion – a case that is now read by every Constitutional law student — that upheld his conviction on the grounds of military necessity and is generally viewed by contemporary legal scholars as having been wrongly decided then.
In 1983, Korematsu successfully re-opened his case in federal court where his conviction was overturned when the court found that the government’s case in the 1940s had been based on false, misleading, and racially biased information. Not only a vindication for Korematsu personally, his case helped heal the wounds of thousands of Japanese Americans who continued to feel the sting of shame and the stigma of the government branding them disloyal during World War II.
In January 1998, Fred Korematsu was honored in a White House ceremony with the country’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom where President Clinton remarked, “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… To that distinguished list, today we add the name of Fred Korematsu.â€
War makes people go crazy and… I am not going to blog about concentration camp, but we should remember those who had to experence it and learn from the history. Speaking of war making people go crazy, just saw a movie Contol Room. It’s a documentary about Iraq War from point of view of people working for Al Jazeera Arab TV station. I learned for the first time of many things that was mentioned in the movie, I guess I just didn’t seek the information. Ignorance is a very bad thing, worse than I thought. As a person who works in the fringe of journalism, I am glad that I saw the movie… Wow.
