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Fred Korematsu, a Civil Rights Pioneer

By Paul Igasaki, IMDiversity Featured Columnist

April 6, 2005 - This week, Fred Korematsu, Japanese American and civil rights hero, passed away. Fred was a role model for all who care about civil rights and I considered him a valued and inspirational friend.

I became acquainted with Fred when I was working for redress for the survivors of America’s World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. He was impressive then, someone in our supposedly quiet and non-confrontational community who stood up to the United States government when our community’s freedom and existence as Americans were at risk. This was before Thurgood Marshall took the Brown case to the Supreme Court, before Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus boycott, and before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The civil rights movement had few victories at that time and the courts were not a promising place to vindicate claims of racism, especially with national security at its root. Initially, even the ACLU, shied away from fighting the relocation.

I got to know Fred better when I was director of the Asian Law Caucus. A Civil Rights Fund was started by him and his family as part of the Caucus’ commitment to ongoing civil rights work. It became clear that Fred was the kind of down to earth, working-class American that is not routinely connected to civil rights actions. Many things he said were very non-PC, reflecting his honest reactions to situations and problems. The other two Japanese Americans who protested the relocation were Min Yasui and Gordon Hirabayashi, both impressive men in their own right. Min was a lawyer looking to challenge the law; he marched into a police station and turned himself in. Gordon was a Quaker who objected to war. Fred wanted to stay near his Caucasian girlfriend. Both of the other two plaintiffs also challenged their criminal convictions under the theory of coram nobis in the 1980’s. Both did important work for the community. But no one has done as much to fight for civil rights for all, and not just Japanese or even Asian Americans as Fred has. He is one person who definitely learned, and indeed practiced, the lessons of what our community went through during World War II: when the rights of any person, especially the least popular among us at any point in time, are violated, then the rights of all of us are in jeopardy.

In many ways, Fred is most like Rosa Parks, an African American who decided that she just wasn’t going to go to the back of the bus on a given day. One of my favorite photos of Fred was taken when he and Rosa met. It hung in the lobby of the Asian Law Caucus. When I mentioned the picture to Fred, he said, “You know, I don’t think she knew who I was. She was very nice anyway.”

Fred’s voice was even and calming. He seemed professorial with the pipe that he loved. But while the sound of his voice was quiet, his actions were something else entirely. As a law student, I remember reading about Fred in my Constitutional law class. It is interesting how much of Japanese American history made that casebook. At that time in my life, I knew Fred only as a historical figure. His efforts, along with a dedicated group of attorneys, including Peter Irons, Dale Minami and the Asian Law Caucus, couldn’t reverse Korematsu vs. the United States. But using the seldom used writ of coram nobis, they vacated his original criminal conviction for violating the relocation order based on the government knowingly withholding information that it had demonstrating that Japanese Americans were indeed not the security threat that the government claimed. Aiko and Jack Herzig helped unearth the proof of this poring over documents at the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

In recent years, Fred toured the nation speaking to all that would listen about his concern for Arab and Muslim Americans, and those like South Asians that were perceived to be Muslim, facing the same sort of scapegoating that Japanese Americans faced many years ago. His fight for coram nobis was the subject of an award-winning documentary a few years back. More recently, his story was told in a powerful movie that his son helped put together. I smiled the other day as Fred’s words from that film, “Of Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs,” were used on National Public Radio to explain the importance of his life.

President Bill Clinton awarded Fred the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Fred was honored, but he didn’t lose track of the fact that the very government that considered him a racial enemy was finally recognizing what he did for the principles that we have been told our nation is built upon. More than most Americans, he was well aware of the truth of the words of our founders, that our rights are only real if we act to defend them. And more than just a handful of Americans through our history, Fred lived those words throughout his life.