It took 70 years to overturn Korematsu. We can’t wait that long to right today’s wrongs.
The following essay was written by Karen Korematsu, the founder and Executive Director of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute.
Thirty years ago, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which granted reparations to Japanese Americans incarcerated during the hysteria of World War II. My father, Fred Korematsu, was one of the nearly 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent who was displaced and incarcerated in prison camps. He fought against the unjust and unconstitutional imprisonment, for redress and reparations after losing his case, and to prevent future injustices from reoccurring.
The 1944 Supreme Court ruling in my father’s case, Korematsu v. United States was wrong the day it was decided. Since then, it’s been a long, arduous journey to overturning Korematsu earlier this year.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the redress and reparations movement had taken root. Community members told their stories of displacement, incarceration, and rejected the government’s false narrative of “military necessity.” In 1983, secret WWII intelligence reports and Justice Department memos stating Japanese Americans had committed no wrong and posed no threat to our national security were discovered. These reports were suppressed, altered, destroyed, and never presented before the Court.
With the new evidence, Federal District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel granted the writ of coram nobis in the case of my father and overturned his WWII-era criminal convictions related to the incarceration. In her ruling, Judge Patel wrote “In times of international hostility and antagonisms our institutions, legislative, executive and judicial, must be prepared to exercise their authority to protect all citizens from the petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused.”
The deep-seated racial animus that justified incarceration was finally exposed and rejected. The voices of Japanese Americans was seared in the public consciousness and could not be ignored. Congress listened. Even the President of the United States listened.
All this time, however, since 1944, my father’s Supreme Court case was still good law. Americans could be incarcerated simply because of who they were, and this was constitutional. Last month, Justice Roberts in Court’s majority decision in Muslim Travel Ban case Trump v. Hawaii declared “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — has no place in law under the Constitution.”
I was shocked when I heard that my father’s case was overturned. As I read the actual decision, the Court repudiated Korematsu, but at the same time it justified the Muslim Travel Ban. The Court exchanged one bad decision for another. My shock turned to outrage.
We can’t wait decades again for these wrongs to be fixed again. We fought so hard when we passed the the Civil Liberties Act. We can do it again because we remember the lessons of history. Justice is in our DNA.
Together, we can fortify our civil and human rights. We can safeguard our democracy. We can protect our families from separation. We can be the beacon of hope for the world again. We will always, as my father said, “Stand up for what’s right.”
