LOS ANGELES (CNS) — A virtual celebration of Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution will be held Saturday, remembering the shipyard welder who challenged the constitutionality of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
The hourlong celebration will begin at 3 p.m. and include special guests marking the 10th anniversary of the first Korematsu Day in California.
The link to the celebration organized by the San Francisco-based Fred T. Korematsu Institute is available here.
Korematsu was arrested in 1942 and convicted of violating President Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order authorizing the incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent in camps throughout the nation.
Korematsu lost an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1944 that the incarceration was justified due to military necessity.
Legal historian Peter Irons and researcher Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga discovered key documents in 1983 that government intelligence agencies had hidden from the Supreme Court before it made its ruling. They consistently showed that Japanese Americans had committed no acts of treason to justify mass incarceration, leading a federal court to overturn Korematsu's conviction.
"After my father's conviction was overturned in 1983, his mission was education," said Karen Korematsu, a co-founder of the institute.
Korematsu went on to champion the cause of civil liberties, not only seeking redress for Japanese Americans who were wrongfully incarcerated, but also traveling throughout the nation to advocate for the civil rights of other victims, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
He received the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Bill Clinton in 1998. He died in 2005 at the age of 86.
Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution was established under a bill by Assemblymen Warren Furutani, D-Harbor Gateway, and Marty Block, D-San Diego, and signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on September 23, 2010.
The day is observed on January 30, the anniversary of Korematsu's birth in 1919 in Oakland. It is the first day in U.S. history named after an Asian American.
In his proclamation declaring Saturday as Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution, Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote, "Korematsu's legacy reminds us that we must continue to strike out against injustice in our daily lives. Especially in a moment of increased anti-Asian sentiment and xenophobia, each and every one of us must continue his fight for a more equal tomorrow."