Remember Korematsu

Soon, the United States will honor our servicemen and women who died at Pearl Harbor. It also provides an occasion to remember the thousands of Japanese citizens who were forcibly removed from U.S. homes and placed in internment camps (pictured above, at Tulare Fairgrounds).

Some key facts:

By presidential edict (Executive Order 9066), Japanese Americans were forcibly ordered to report to internment camps during World War II regardless of citizenship.

Fred Korematsu was born in Oakland to Japanese parents who immigrated to the U.S. The order came down when he was about 23 years old. He evaded the order; he was caught and arrested for being a “Jap”; he was convicted; and he detained in the Central Utah War Relocation Center in Topaz, Utah.

Korematsu sued the United States, claiming that the executive order was unconstitutional. He lost on a 6-3 vote

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Justice Hugo Black wrote for the majority: “Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. 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, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, 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.”

Justice Frank Murphy dissented: “I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.”

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The decision is widely regarded as one of the Court’s greatest embarrassments—but no occasion has arisen to overrule it. Thus, when Trump surrogates speak of precedent to round up groups of people—and here they clearly mean Muslims and/or Mexicans— they are technically correct. But they are morally bankrupt.