Japanese American redress and court cases
Some 5,500 Issei men arrested by the FBI immediately after Pearl Harbor were already in Justice Department or Army custody,[1] and 5,000 were able to "voluntarily" relocate outside the exclusion zone;[2] the remaining Japanese Americans were "evacuated" from their homes and placed in isolated concentration camps over the spring of 1942.
[1] In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the forced eviction, when Fred Korematsu's challenge to his conviction for violating an exclusion order was struck down (see below).
The Court limited its decision to the validity of the orders to leave the West Coast military area, avoiding the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens.
In the memos, they complained that they were being forced to tell lies in court about the threat posed by the JapaneseThe discussion this case sparked involved two key issues.
("Mitsuye Endo Persevering for Justice") It was two years later that the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that persons of Japanese descent could not be held in confinement without proof of their disloyalty, stating that detention in Relocation Centers of persons of Japanese ancestry regardless of loyalty is not only unauthorized by the Congress or the Executive, but it is another example of the unconstitutional resort to racism in the entire evacuation programand Endo and thousands of her fellow detainees were allowed to return to their homes on the Pacific Coast.
Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, said that legal restrictions on the rights of a single racial group will always be: "suspect" and that "courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny."
Compulsory exclusion of large groups of citizens from their homes, except under circumstances of direst emergency and peril, is inconsistent with our basic governmental institutions.
But when under conditions of modern warfare our shores are threatened by hostile forces, the power to protect must be commensurate with the threatened danger.In Justice Owen Roberts' dissent, he said: [This] is the case of convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, based on his ancestry, and solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States.Justice Robert Jackson said that comparable burdens were not imposed upon descendants of the other nationalities such as Germans and Italians with whom the United States was also at war.
Swept up in the larger civil rights movement and ethnic pride of the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Nikkei activists began pushing for a reexamination of their parents' and grandparents' wartime experiences.
Many had only recently learned of the incarceration, as their elders had remained hesitant to discuss the issue openly, and a debate over whether the community was owed reparations began to spread.
In 1970, the Japanese American Citizens League endorsed a resolution to urge Congress to compensate each camp survivor for each day they had spent in confinement (although the organization committed no resources to actual lobbying).
[8] Meanwhile, younger and more left-leaning redress activists formed the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations (NCRR), and worked to open the CWRIC hearings to Japanese Americans outside the elite, non-confrontational cohort favored by JACL leadership.
[3] After the hearings, NCRR activists continued to wage a grass roots campaign for redress, while the JACL focused on passing legislation that would implement the CWRIC's recommendations and NCJAR turned its efforts to a federal lawsuit that would force the government to compensate former camp inmates.
In 1981, during testimony before the CWRIC, the Nisei attorney Frank Chuman proposed using the writ of coram nobis to overturn the convictions of Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui.
Shortly thereafter, scholar Peter Irons and attorney Dale Minami submitted a coram nobis petition, based on recently discovered evidence of official misconduct.
The plaintiffs in this case were nineteen Japanese Americans and their descendants, who brought civil actions against the United States seeking declaratory relief and compensation for injuries sustained when the detainees were forced to evacuate their homes and relocate to internment camps during the Second World WarWilliam Hohri was living in San Francisco when he was removed and forcibly incarcerated during World War II in Manzanar.
Available at http://www1.cuny.edu/portal_ur/content/womens_leadership/mitsuye_endo.html This article from the women's history section of the City University in New York website relates the events pertaining to Mitsuye Endo's battle against American courts for release from the relocation camp she was confined to, and reinstatement to her job.
The various testimonies describe how the camps were overcrowded, and many prisoners committed suicide; businesses collapsed, leaving people without a means of livelihood even after their eventual release; many people lost family members who were forcibly removed from such gatherings at weddings and taken to undisclosed destinations; and how the detainees were forcibly confined in prisons which "were little better than concentration camps."
This case is about Fred Korematsu, who refused to obey the wartime order to leave his home and report to a relocation camp for Japanese Americans.
