On This Day: Supreme Court Upholds Internment of Japanese Americans

In 1942, in the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history, almost 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forced from their homes and transported to internment camps all over the western United States.

The policy was the direct result of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Signed in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the order designated all West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry—whether citizens or not—as “enemy aliens.”

Fred Korematsu, a son of Japanese immigrants living in San Francisco, defied the military and police, remaining with his Italian-American girlfriend while his family was transported to an internment camp in Tanforan, Calif. He assumed a new identity and had plastic surgery to alter his appearance, but he was caught on May 30, 1942 and taken to Tanforan.

With the help of an ACLU director, Korematsu filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, arguing that his constitutional rights had been violated and that he had suffered racial discrimination. He lost lower court cases, receiving a five-year probation for violating the executive order.

The case eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court; a year earlier, the court had upheld the constitutionality of curfews for Japanese-Americans in Yasui v. United States and Hirabayashi v. United States. The cases served as the foundation for the Korematsu case, with the justices ruling 6-3 to uphold his arrest and internment.

Justice Hugo Black, writing the majority opinion, defended internment on the basis of national security: “He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures … and finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders—as inevitably it must—determined that they should have the power to do just this.”

Justices Frank Murphy, Robert Jackson and Owen Roberts dissented. Murphy wrote that the decision was a “legalization of racism,” while Jackson warned of its potential consequences.

“The Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens,” he wrote. “The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”

In the 1980s, law professor Peter Irons discovered government documents that showed the Justice Department overstated the threat posed by Japanese-Americans. Irons and a team of pro bono attorneys had Korematsu’s case reopened, and in 1983, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel reversed his conviction.

The case, Patel said, “stands as a caution that in times of distress the shield of military necessity and national security must not be used to protect governmental actions from close scrutiny and accountability.”

In 1988, the U.S. government conceded that the relocation program was based on racial bias. Ten years later, Korematsu was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “Plessy, Brown, Parks ... to that distinguished list, today we add the name of Fred Korematsu,” President Bill Clinton said during the award ceremony.

Korematsu died of respiratory failure on March 31, 2005 at the age of 86. “Fred was an ordinary American with extraordinary courage,” said Irons.

On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese Empire launched a surprise aerial attack on a U.S. Naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The following day, President Roosevelt and Congress declared war on Japan.

Many Americans feared that Japan could launch a similar attack on the West Coast. On Feb. 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans, under the justification that some may be aiding the Japanese war effort.

Over the next several years, Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese descent were rounded up and interned in military camps. In June 21, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of curfew laws, providing the legal basis for the Korematsu case. The internment camps remained open until after the end of the Pacific War in August 1945.