Resisting Injustice
Four Japanese Americans became famous for their resistance, taking cases all the way to the Supreme Court during WWII.
Gordon Hirabayashi refused to comply with the curfew orders put in place after Executive Order 9066 and refused to register for forced removal. After his arrest, he entered a plea of “not guilty,” saying that the curfew and exclusion laws were racially prejudicial and unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld his curfew conviction.
Fred Korematsu refused to report to a camp. He challenged the constitutionality of the removal orders but was found guilty. The Supreme Court agreed.
Minoru “Min” Yasui demanded to be arrested for breaking curfew. He was convicted and lost his appeal before the Supreme Court.
From left to right, Gordon Hirabayashi, Minoru Yasui, and Fred Korematsu, 1983. Pres. Clinton awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, to Korematsu in 1998. Pres. Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Gordon Hirabayashi in 2012 and Minoru Yasui in 2015. Photo by Bob Hsiang. Courtesy of Farallon Films.
Mitsuye Endo, born in Sacramento, CA in 1920, was sent to the Sacramento Assembly Center and then Tule Lake. When the Japanese American Citizens League began to look for a suitable plaintiff for a challenge of the incarceration through a habeas corpus petition, lawyer James C. Purcell believed Endo to be the perfect candidate: she was Methodist, had a brother in the army, and had never been to Japan.
Endo's lawsuit led to the closing of the camps. In December 1944, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the government could not continue to incarcerate citizens once their loyalty had been established. Endo’s case was the only one of the four that proved successful during the 1940s. Even so, the camps were not completely closed until 1946.
