Honoring Fred Korematsu and the Day of Remembrance

The way I've heard the story is that in June of 1942, Fred Korematsu, a 22-year-old draftsman, was locked up in the Oakland Jail, when he was surprised to learn that he had a visitor. It turned out to be a stranger, by the name of Ernest Besig.

Besig, who was then the Executive Director of the ACLU of Northern California, had read an article in the local paper about a U.S. citizen of Japanese descent who refused to go quietly to the internment camps. He clipped the article and drove to the jail to meet Fred Korematsu and to offer the ACLU'S assistance in representing him.

Who could have known on that summer day that Fred Korematsu's resistance, born out of some very basic sense of justice, and his meeting with Ernie Besig, would create a significant chapter in the advancement of civil rights in this country.

It was a long journey from Fred Korematsu's incarceration in a local jail, to concentration camps, through the darkest days of wartime anti Japanese hysteria, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. His brave challenge to the government's decision to intern Japanese Americans was rejected then by the high court; his conviction for refusing to obey was upheld. It was a journey so painful, that for decades he couldn't even share these events with his own children. Yet forty years later, with that same sense of justice and courage, he decided to reopen the case; and, in 1983, won a successful reversal of his conviction.

This long journey made the short walk to the podium last month, to accept the Medal of Freedom from the President of the United States, a sweet irony. Once denounced as an enemy alien, today Fred Korematsu is the recipient of the highest civilian honor for his courage in trying to force a nation, even during a time of war, to adhere to the principles of the Bill of Rights.

With a perspective, I'm Dorothy Ehrlich.

Dorothy Ehrlich is the Executive Director of the ACLU of Northern California.