Fred Korematsu

Nisei male. Born January 30, 1919, in Oakland, California. Mr. Korematsu was working as a welder in San Francisco when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After Executive Order 9066 was issued in 1942, he decided to resist the evacuation orders, and was not removed with his family. He was arrested in May of 1942, taken to jail, and eventually transferred to the Tanforan Assembly Center, California, where his family was being held. He legally challenged the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, and his case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the order in 1944. Following World War II, Mr. Korematsu moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he married and raised a family before returning to California. In the early 1980s, his case was reopened after the discovery of a crucial document indicating that in the original 1944 case, the federal government had lied to the high court. The conviction was vacated by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in 1983, and in 1998, Mr. Korematsu was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.