Fred Korematsu passed away March 30, 2005 at his daughter's home of respiratory illness. He is known for having challenged the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in the court case Korematsu v. United States (1944), where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the internment was justified due to "military necessity."
He was vindicated in 1983, with the help of three Japanese American lawyers.
Nearly forty years after the original ruling, a San Francisco judge overturned Korematsu's conviction, citing government misconduct through suppression, alteration and burning of evidence, race discrimination, lack of military necessity, and manifest injustice. [via aam]
To Tamaki, "the case represented the trials that Japanese Americans never had.'' [cite]
More recently, Korematsu, along with many other Japanese American internees, was concerned about how the nation would handle its fears post-9/11, and spoke out against the racial profiling of Arab Americans. He addressed Michelle Malkin's book In Defense of Internment with the hopes that the racial injustices he suffered would not persist today:
Fears and prejudices directed against minority communities are too easy to evoke and exaggerate, often to serve the political agendas of those who promote those fears. I know what it is like to be at the other end of such scapegoating and how difficult it is to clear one's name after unjustified suspicions are endorsed as fact by the government. If someone is a spy or terrorist they should be prosecuted for their actions. But no one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy.
Relevant articles and links:
Korematsu's article in the SF Chronicle [link]
Fred Korematsu Dies at Age 86 [sfgate]
Fred Korematsu, at center of landmark internment case, dies [SJ Mercury News]
My previous remarks on Malkin [link]
And a film on the relevance of internment today.
