Fred Korematsu
For thirty years, Fred Korematsu kept quiet. His own daughter did not learn what her father had done until she was in high school. The man who had defied Executive Order 9066 -- the wartime directive that forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes -- lived in Oakland as a quiet family man, working as a draftsman, volunteering with the Boy Scouts, serving as president of his local Lions Club. The Supreme Court had ruled against him in 1944, and the weight of that defeat had settled into something like shame. He once told an interviewer he felt partly responsible for the internment itself, because his case had been lost. It would take a law professor's discovery of buried government documents to reopen the wound -- and finally begin to heal it.
A Street Corner in San Leandro
Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born on January 30, 1919, in Oakland, California, the third of four sons in a family of Japanese immigrant flower nursery owners. When Executive Order 9066 came down in February 1942, authorizing the military to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast, Korematsu made a choice that most of his community did not. He refused to go. In a desperate bid to remain free, he underwent plastic surgery on his eyelids, changed his name to Clyde Sarah, and claimed Spanish and Hawaiian heritage. It did not work. On May 30, 1942, military police arrested him on a street corner in San Leandro. Ernest Besig, director of the Northern California ACLU, visited him in jail and asked if he would be willing to challenge the internment in court. Korematsu agreed. The national ACLU, wary of antagonizing President Roosevelt during wartime, urged Besig not to take the case. He took it anyway.
Convicted for Being American
The trial moved quickly. On September 8, 1942, a federal court convicted Korematsu of violating Public Law 503, which criminalized disobedience of military orders issued under Executive Order 9066. He was sentenced to five years' probation and taken directly from the courtroom to the Tanforan Assembly Center -- a converted horse racing track in San Bruno where internees slept in horse stalls under single light bulbs. Korematsu later said jail had been better. His own community largely shunned him; many Japanese Americans had cooperated with the internment order, hoping compliance would demonstrate their loyalty, and they viewed Korematsu's defiance as dangerous. At the Topaz internment camp in Utah, where his family was eventually relocated, fellow internees recognized him and kept their distance. The case climbed through the courts until December 18, 1944, when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against Korematsu, holding that the exclusion order was justified by military necessity.
The Long Silence
After the camps closed, Korematsu moved to Salt Lake City. He found work repairing water tanks, only to discover after three months that he was being paid half of what his white coworkers earned. When he confronted his boss, the man threatened to have him arrested simply for being Japanese. Korematsu left. He drifted to Detroit, where his younger brother lived, and worked as a draftsman until 1949. He married Kathryn Pearson in 1946, and they returned to Oakland when his mother fell ill. They stayed, raised two children, and built a quiet life. For more than three decades, Korematsu did not speak publicly about his case. The Supreme Court loss hung over him like a verdict not just on his actions but on his judgment -- on whether it had been worth it to resist at all.
Buried Evidence
In the early 1980s, Peter Irons, a law professor at the University of California, San Diego, was researching a book on wartime internment cases when he uncovered something extraordinary. Government records showed that Solicitor General Charles Fahy had deliberately suppressed FBI and military intelligence reports concluding that Japanese Americans posed no security threat. The military had lied to the Supreme Court, and government lawyers had knowingly presented false evidence. Irons contacted Korematsu and assembled a legal team led by attorney Dale Minami to petition for a writ of error coram nobis -- a rarely used mechanism to overturn convictions based on prosecutorial misconduct. On November 10, 1983, in a San Francisco courtroom, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel formally vacated Korematsu's conviction. Standing before her, Korematsu said: "If anyone should do any pardoning, I should be the one pardoning the government for what they did to the Japanese-American people."
The Name That Stands for Millions
In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom, placing his name alongside Plessy, Brown, and Parks in the arc of American civil rights. That year, he served as Grand Marshal of San Francisco's Cherry Blossom Festival. After September 11, 2001, the quiet man from Oakland became vocal again, filing amicus briefs with the Supreme Court urging the government not to repeat the mistakes of wartime hysteria with people of Middle Eastern descent. Korematsu died on March 30, 2005, at his daughter's home in Marin County. One of the last things he said was: "I really hope that this will never happen to anybody else because of the way they look." In 2010, California designated January 30 -- his birthday -- as Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution. In 2018, the Supreme Court declared in Trump v. Hawaii that his original case had been wrongly decided and was "morally repugnant." The vindication arrived seventy-four years late, but it arrived.
From the Air
Located at 37.835°N, 122.237°W in the East Bay, near Oakland and San Leandro where Korematsu was arrested. Nearby airports include Oakland International (KOAK) and Hayward Executive (KHWD). From the air, the East Bay's residential neighborhoods stretch along the hills where Korematsu's family once ran their flower nursery. Mountain View Cemetery, where he is buried, is visible on the Oakland hills at around 2,000-3,000 feet AGL.