Fred Korematsu

Anti-Japanese and anti-Asian sentiment was widespread on the West Coast leading up to World War II. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of all Japanese and Japanese-American citizens from the West Coast and into internment camps. Oakland native, Fred Korematsu became an icon for civil rights by challenging the legality of the order.

A second-generation Japanese-American, Korematsu grew up in Oakland and San Leandro California. He was patriotic and well assimilated into American society. Growing up he had a white girlfriend and planned to join the Navy. He was rejected from the Navy for health reasons and instead chose to join the war effort by working on the shipyards in Oakland.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor he was fired from his welding position and could not find work elsewhere due to being of Japanese ancestry. After Roosevelt issued the order for all Japanese-Americans to be sent to internment camps, Korematsu created a fake identity for himself, claiming to be part Spanish and part Hawaiian, and even underwent slight plastic surgery to make himself appear less Asian. However he was arrested by military police in San Leandro and taken to jail. While he was in jail, the American Civil Liberties Union asked him if he would file a suit against the federal government to challenge the constitutionality of the internment camps. He agreed.

His case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the justices agreed with the government. The ruling stated that the internment was legal due to "military necessity." During this time and until the end of the war Korematsu was placed in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah.

Eventually Korematsu moved back to Oakland. In the 1980s a college professor found a group of papers written by the US government in the 1940s explicitly expressing that Japanese Americans posed no threat to the US government or the war effort. These papers were willfully suppressed during Korematsu's original trial. With this new evidence Korematsu went back to the courts. This time the courts overturned Korematsu's conviction, however they did not overturn the original Supreme Court ruling, which still stands to this day.

In 1988 the US government publicly apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans and offered survivors of the internment $20,000 each. A decade later, in 1998 President Bill Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.

After the September 11, 2003 attacks on the World Trade Center Korematsu linked the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII to the imprisonment of Muslims in Guantanamo Bay Cuba. He filed briefs to the Supreme Court in cases where he believed the government was repeating the same mistakes it made in WWII; imprisoning civilians without trial due to "military necessity."

Korematsu died in 2005 at the age of 86. In 2010, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill making January 30 Fred Korematsu Day. A number of schools and streets are named after him in the Bay Area and he has statues in both Oakland and San Jose. He is buried at the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.