In 1945 the US Supreme Court affirmed the conviction of Fred Koramatsu for violating the Exclusion Order issued in 1942 which sent all citizens of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps. Fred, a life long resident of San Leandro, California, was simultaneously excluded from leaving the area; therefore, his only wrongdoing was his ethnicity of birth. Justice Hugo Black writing for the 6 justices who affirmed the conviction, rationalized: “Hardships are a part of war, and war is an aggregation of hardships.”
More than 50 years later, Koramatsu received the Presidential Medal for Freedom, for his courage and persistence in opposing injustice. In accepting the award Fred reminded the nation: “we should be vigilant to make sure this will never happen again.” At Holden we studied the brief Koramatsu filed with the Supreme Court in 2004 urging them to hear the appeals of the Guantanamo detainees challenging the legality of their incarceration. Among the many instances of the misuse of the rubric of “military necessity” to violate civil liberties, Koramatsu quoted a distinguished legal panel reviewing the government response to the Red Scare in the 1920s:
...and we may well wonder in view of the precedents now established whether constitutional government as heretofore maintained in this republic could survive another great war even victoriously waged.”
Questions we wrestled with included:
Why does the Koramatsu case matter to us as Christians?
Why does it matter to us as citizens in 2007?
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