Engines of Liberty by David Cole

Author:David Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

13

Korematsu’s Legacy

WHEN FRED KOREMATSU, AN AMERICAN CITIZEN OF JAPANESE DESCENT, REFUSED TO report for internment during World War II, he could not have known that his case would reach the Supreme Court, much less that it would eventually play a part in the treatment of executive power after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Korematsu lost his case in the Supreme Court in 1944, when the Court ruled that the president was justified in treating all persons of Japanese descent as suspect simply because of their race and ethnicity, without individualized evidence that any of them posed a threat. But Korematsu did not accept the Court’s word as final. Eventually, he and his supporters prevailed in the judgment of history. The story of Korematsu’s long struggle for justice leads, ultimately, to the case Michael Ratner and his co-counsel filed against President Bush for detentions without trial at Guantánamo. When the Guantánamo case came before the Supreme Court, Fred Korematsu filed an amicus brief urging the Court not to repeat its mistakes. It is almost certainly the most important amicus brief filed in the case—not so much because of its content, but because of who submitted it, and the history he represented.

It was far from inevitable that the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Korematsu’s wartime conviction would come to be seen as a shameful mistake. It was certainly not viewed as such at the time it was decided. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, directing that all persons of Japanese descent be excluded from the West Coast, and establishing internment camps for over 110,000 people. Shortly thereafter, Congress ratified the president’s action by enacting a statute making it a crime to disobey the exclusion order. During the war, the ACLU was a lonely critic of internment, and even its objections were muted. The ACLU’s national board sent a letter to Roosevelt in March 1942 expressing concerns over the constitutionality of his executive order. But many board members had close ties to the Roosevelt administration, and they attempted without success to dissuade the ACLU’s two California chapters from challenging the internment in court.

Other groups that one might have expected to object did not. Most conspicuously, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), not wanting to reinforce suspicions that the Japanese community was hostile to the war effort, advocated cooperation with the order. It specifically distanced itself from the few Japanese-Americans, such as Korematsu, who resisted internment, saying “National Headquarters is unalterably opposed to test cases… at this time.” The National Lawyers Guild, a progressive bar association, similarly declined to criticize the initiative.1

Fred Korematsu resisted. The son of Japanese immigrants who ran a plant nursery, Korematsu tried to enlist when war broke out, but was turned away. When he learned of Roosevelt’s order, he refused to report for internment and attempted to pass as non-Japanese. But in 1942, he was arrested and charged with evading the exclusion order. The ACLU agreed to represent him, and challenged the internment order as racial and ethnic discrimination.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.