Fred Korematsu Day
During World War 2, my family, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans, were forcibly relocated from their homes and shipped halfway across the country to live behind barbed wire. At the time, the Government ordered this action a “military necessity,” and we referred to them as “internment camps.” Fred Korematsu, with the help of ACLU representatives, challenged this idea of military necessity and utilized the court system to reach the Supreme Court. He lost his case in 1944, but evidence uncovered in the early 1980s shows the Government was lying to mask their rampant xenophobia and racism. Now, time has revealed truth, and we call them incarceration or concentration camps to acknowledge and correct the misleading language of the past and focus on accuracy going into the future. However, this has not stopped the story of Fred Korematsu from remaining merely a footnote in history books.
To spread Fred’s relatively unknown story, Karen Korematsu (his daughter) and the Fred T. Korematsu Institute have worked to establish Fred Korematsu Day across the US. It was and has remained a strategy of working towards visibility and inclusion under a structurally racist context of erasure and exclusion. To maximize the effectiveness of proclaimed Fred Korematsu Days, we would also host events spreading awareness of the day. I helped plan five different Fred Korematsu Day events during my time as an intern and seasonal volunteer. In our planning process, we would always start by brainstorming the kinds of contemporary connections we could make. How could we reinterpret the story using a new historical context? What communities could we connect with? How could we fight together and in solidarity for collective liberation? This connection to the contemporary has always been the main focus of Fred Korematsu Day programs.
One particular Fred Korematsu Day I will always remember is from 2017. As fate would have it, it fell on January 29th, two days after Tump’s first Muslim Ban and one day before Google’s doodle went viral. Initially, our program focused on mass incarceration as a partnership with Alicia Garza from Black Lives Matter, but the majority of the conversation ended up shifting, given the circumstances. It was a chilling event.
Over the next year and a half, I tracked the Muslim Ban case as it went through the court system, looking at the arguments and evidence used. During this time, our Educational Director, Freda, was working on updating our Fred Korematsu Curriculum Toolkit. I remember at one point we discussed including a lesson plan containing the Trump tweets used as evidence in the case, but that ended up not being included due to our non-profit status.
When the case made it to the Supreme Court, I was optimistic that it would be struck down. The precedent seemed so obvious, and even large corporations were writing statements in opposition to the ban. If the voice of a large corporation has no weight, what does? Instead, Justice Roberts proclaimed, “Whatever rhetorical advantage the dissent may see in doing so…Korematsu has nothing to do with this case.” It was a devastating opinion to read. Part of me felt like all the work we had done in those several years prior had been for nothing. In our teaching guide, given away freely all around the world, “Connections to Present Day” is literally the first section. I even remember formatting the pages in Adobe InDesign to send off to the printer. We put the section first because of how important it was. Karen Korematsu wrote a response in the New York Times offering an alternate “opinion.”
Now, as I think of Fred Korematsu Day and what it means in 2020, I not only remember that moment of despair, but I also think of the picture of Fred surrounded by his legal team. I love the image of a Nisei (2nd generation) supported by a group of Sansei (3rd generation). To me, it’s indicative of how the stories of our ancestors speak through us, demanding us to honor them. I’ve come to believe each new generation must ensure the stories of the past get retold. I believe stories are lessons we can use to uplift marginalized communities and are necessary in the fight towards positive structural change. I think the key to this is for these lessons to be translated through the perspective of each new generation, ensuring a continuous uplift into public consciousness. In my mind, Fred Korematsu Day is one example of this.
