Fred Korematsu

I said, 'Well, can't you have someone else do it first?' It was awfully hard for me, but I agreed to do it at the moment because they said it's for the good of everybody, and so I said, 'Well, if that's it, I'll go ahead and do it.'"

The court wanted badly to claim that they would never justify racism under law, and in the Fred Korematsu case, they pretended not to be rubber-stamping prejudice.

And after, uh, a large and heated conversation among Justice Department lawyers in the parallel Korematsu case, the lawyers relied on General DeWitt's so-called final report that had claimed, uh, many falsehoods about Japanese Americans signaling and doing other things to support the Japanese military from the West Coast.

But when it came to Endo, there was literally no excuse that could be made.

Mitsuye's was the only successful challenge to the incarceration.

One day before the court's decision, the government proclaimed that loyal Japanese Americans could return to the West Coast.

Her victory didn't happen because every justice who had denied Fred Korematsu's rights suddenly pivoted and saw his error.

Instead, the justices faced with Endo could not conjure the imaginary threat that a majority of them had managed to conjure with the contemporaneous and more famous cases of Korematsu and others.

That's a true story.

And there was a guy named Fred Korematsu who stayed.

He said, I own my home.

Like, I'm an American citizen.

But governments already distinguish between this was legal and this was later recognized as a wrong that required repair.

In 1944, the US Supreme Court upheld Japanese American internment in a case brought by Fred Korematsu, a welder in California who refused to go to the camps.

It was legal.

In 1988, Congress apologized and paid surviving internees $20,000.

And in 2018, the Chief Justice said, Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided.

Canada also provided redress to Japanese Canadians interned under the War Measures Act.

An apology, $21,000 each.

Seventy percent of Japanese Americans lived in California, and as a result of this order, more than 110,000 people, almost two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were sent to internment camps, where they lived in makeshift barracks under the eyes and searchlights of guards.

A man named Fred Korematsu appealed his conviction for failing to show up for internment all the way to the Supreme Court, where he lost in yet another horrendous Supreme Court decision.

Okay, let's go to the Thought Bubble.

The group that experienced the greatest change during World War II was probably African Americans.

It's an incredibly elegant, pragmatic framework, but the courts are not always so willing to check the president, especially when the president claims absolute military necessity during wartime.

This brings us to one of the most solemn and dark chapters in American constitutional history, Korematsu v.

US in nineteen forty-four.

Korematsu is a critical case for understanding how structural limits can buckle under the pressure of war.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order nine zero six six.

This order authorized the military to designate military areas from which any or all persons could be excluded.

Based on this order, the military mandated the forced relocation and internment of over one hundred thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry into desolate detention camps.

Fred Korematsu, an American citizen born in California, refused to leave his home and was arrested.