Fred Korematsu, the Japanese American whose court case over his refusal to be interned during World War II went to the U.S. Supreme Court and became synonymous with this nation's agonized debate over civil liberties during times of war, has died. He was 86.
Korematsu died Wednesday of respiratory illness at his daughter's home in the Northern California community of Larkspur, according to his attorney, Dale Minami.
"He had a very strong will," Minami said of Korematsu. "He was like our Rosa Parks. He took an unpopular stand at a critical point in our history."
In February 1942, about 120,000 U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry -- including citizens and noncitizens -- were ordered out of their homes and into camps after Japan's Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. Korematsu did not turn himself in and was arrested, jailed and convicted of a felony for failing to report for evacuation.
Korematsu was one of several who challenged the constitutionality of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment. His case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1944 the court upheld the order.
But as was discovered many years later, the court -- and the nation -- had been gravely misled about the potential dangers from Japanese Americans.
Indeed, the Korematsu case was cited as recently as April 2004. At issue before the Supreme Court was whether U.S. courts could review challenges to the incarceration of mostly Afghan prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Korematsu, then 84, filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying, "The extreme nature of the government's position is all too familiar."
Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Bush administration's policy of detaining foreign nationals without legal process at Guantanamo Bay was illegal.
The public stance taken by Korematsu in this and other civil liberties issues in the previous 20 years was in stark contrast to the four decades after the war in which he hid details of the ordeal from his own children.
"He felt responsible for the internment in a sort of backhanded way because his case had been lost in the Supreme Court," legal historian and author Peter H. Irons said in a PBS "POV" documentary on Korematsu by Eric Paul Fournier.
