Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was an American civil rights activist who resisted the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Shortly after the Imperial Japanese Navy launched its attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of individuals of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast from their homes and their mandatory imprisonment in incarceration camps, but Korematsu instead challenged the orders and became a fugitive.
Fred Korematsu
Former horse stalls converted for temporary occupation by Japanese American internees at Tanforan Assembly Center, San Bruno, California, 1942
Fred Korematsu and family
Korematsu at a press conference regarding the coram nobis petitioned for with the federal courts
Internment of Japanese Americans
During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country. Approximately two-thirds of the detainees were United States citizens. These actions were initiated by Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Before the war, about 127,000 Japanese Americans lived in the continental United States, of which about 112,000 lived on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei and Sansei. The rest were Issei immigrants born in Japan, who were ineligible for citizenship. In Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans comprised more than one-third of the territory's population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were incarcerated.
Internment of Japanese Americans
Tatsuro Masuda, a Japanese American, unfurled this banner in Oakland, California the day after the Pearl Harbor attack. Dorothea Lange took this photograph in March 1942, just before his internment.
A child is "Tagged for evacuation", Salinas, California, May 1942. Photo by Russell Lee.
A Japanese American shop, Asahi Dye Works, closing. The notice on the front is a reference to Owens Valley being the first and one of the largest Japanese American detention centers.