Fred Korematsu
1919-2005
I'll never forget my government treating me like this.
In May 1942 Fred Korematsu, a young Japanese American from Oakland, refused to report for internment under Executive Order 9066 and went into hiding. He was arrested on 30 May 1942 in San Leandro, California. On 8 September 1942 a federal court convicted him of disobeying a military exclusion order and gave him five years' probation. On 18 December 1944 the Supreme Court upheld the conviction by 6 votes to 3 in Korematsu v. United States, accepting the exclusion as justified in a time of emergency and peril.
On 10 November 1983 Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the federal court in San Francisco vacated his conviction through a writ of coram nobis. That cleared his name but did not overturn the Supreme Court's decision. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, and California first marked Fred Korematsu Day on 30 January 2011. In Trump v. Hawaii in 2018 the Supreme Court called Korematsu wrongly decided and morally repugnant, although legal scholars still debate whether that formally overruled it.