Interviews

1. Manhunt

2. The Final Verdict

3. A Wrong Righted

Korematsu,Fred

(1919 - 2005) Challenged the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066.

The Final Verdict

And we were worried, you know, until the time that Marilyn Hall Patel announced what, you know, what happened, and then also that she vindicated my case. But until that last minute, until she said that, nobody knew what was gonna happen, and they didn't say anything like, you know, "We're gonna win," because, well, I guess they feared the worst. It could have possibly gone the other way. So until she announced it, we just didn't know. ... Well, everybody was jumping up and down, you know, and crying, and I, I didn't hear it. And I just thought, "That must mean that we won." So, and then I talked to Dale, "Yeah." [Laughs] So Dale says, "Yeah." [Laughs] And Peter said that we did win it.

Date: May 14, 1996

Location: Washington, US

Interviewer: Lorraine Bannai, Tetsuden Kashima

Contributed by: Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project.

Interviewee Bio

Fred Korematsu was born on January 30, 1919, in Oakland, California. Korematsu was working as a welder in San Francisco when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After Executive Order 9066 was issued in 1942, he resisted and made an attempt to leave the state of California. He was apprehended and arrested for failing to report for evacuation. Korematsu was one of several who challenged the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066 in the courts and his case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the order in 1944.

Following World War II, Korematsu moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he married and raised a family before returning to California. In the early 1980s, his case was reopened after the discovery of a document indicating that in the original 1944 case, the federal government had withheld evidence to the high court. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel vacated the conviction in 1983. In 1998, Korematsu was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Fred Korematsu passed away in 2005. (April 15, 2008)