Densho Digital Archive
Steven Okazaki Collection
Title: Peter Irons Interview
Narrator: Peter Irons
Location: San Francisco, California
Date: November 11, 1983
Densho ID: denshovh-ipeter-03-0007

<Begin Segment 7>

Q: Could you tell us about Fred 's arrest and how that came about, and his process?

PI: Okay. Fred's arrest was much different than Gordon's and Min's. He didn't turn himself in as a test case. He was picked up actually standing on a street corner waiting for his girlfriend in San Leandro. He'd gone into a drugstore nearby to buy a pack of cigarettes and Fred thinks that he was recognized by somebody in the store who called the police and said there's a Japanese person at large. so he was picked up by the cops and taken down to the police station, and at first, he refused to identify himself. He had a forged draft card with a different name, he said that he was Spanish Hawaiian ancestry, and after a while in the police stat ion, somebody recognized him and said, "Oh, I know that person, it's Fred Korematsu." So he confessed to who he was. And he was then sent around to three or four different jails. Nobody could really decide what to do with him. He was sent to the military prison, he was sent to the county jail, federal jail, city jail. When Fred's case was tried, it was probably the most interesting of the three trials, because the trial itself took a very short time. The question was, was Fred a person of Japanese ancestry? Yes. Had he violated the exclusion order? Yes. But when the judge convicted him, and he set bail, Fred was free to go on five thousand dollars' bail. And the ACLU lawyer there put up the five thousand dollars, and the judge was going to let Fred go. But there were military police in the audience, and one of them jumped up and grabbed Fred and pulled his pistol on him. Said, "You're coming with me," and everybody got totally flustered. The judge didn't know what to do. He promptly raised his bail to ten thousand dollars. The ACLU put up the $10,000. The MPs kept dragging Fred out of the courtroom. The lawyers were all yelling, you know, "This can't be done." So the judge finally said, "Well, if they have orders to take him, I'll let them go." And so they took Fred back to the military prison.

Q: With the ACLU, could you tell us how they became involved in, say, Fred's case?

PI: The ACLU learned about Fred's case from the newspapers. They'd read about his arrest and the arrest of three or four others for violating the evacuation orders. And Ernie Besig, who was the ACLU director in San Francisco, went to the jail they were being held in and asked these three or four men if they would be willing to let the ACLU represent them as test cases. The others declined. Fred was the only one who agreed to do that. Besig recruited a lawyer to represent Fred, Wayne Collins, who had a very, a one-man practice. Was very passionately committed to Fred's case, but as a lawyer, he was overly emotional, overly rhetorical. The briefs that he wrote to the Supreme Court, I think, were damaging to Fred's case. He threatened the Supreme Court; he said, "If you do not reverse this conviction, the members of this Court will live in infamy." And that kind of rhetoric, I think, is not helpful to your client's case. On the other hand, Collins believed firmly, I mean, he had a real passionate commitment to this case.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.