Fred Korematsu

Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born in Oakland, California, the third of four sons of Japanese immigrant parents who operated a flower nursery. After graduating from Castlemont High School, Korematsu trained as an industrial shipyard welder. When World War II broke out, he attempted to enlist in the US Navy but was rejected on medical grounds, only to be subsequently fired from his defense shipyard job solely because of his Japanese ancestry.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, authorizing the forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. While his family obeyed civilian exclusion orders and was sent to the Tanforan Assembly Center, 23-year-old Korematsu went into hiding in the Bay Area, undergoing minor plastic surgery on his eyelids in an attempt to pass as Spanish-Hawaiian and remain with his Italian-American fiancée.

Arrested in San Leandro in May 1942, Korematsu was visited in jail by Ernest Besig, director of the Northern California ACLU, who asked if he would be willing to serve as a test case to challenge the constitutionality of mass ethnic detention. Korematsu agreed: 'I was a citizen; I had done nothing wrong.' Although the Supreme Court ruled against him in a notorious 6–3 decision in December 1944, legal historian Peter Irons discovered suppressed military intelligence documents in 1982 proving that the federal government had lied to the Court about Japanese-American disloyalty. In November 1983, a federal court formally overturned Korematsu's conviction, and in 1998 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.