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Fred Korematsu at the Family Nursery (Third from Left).
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The Shibuya family pictured at their home before evacuation. The father and the mother were born in Japan and came to the U.S. in 1904. At that time the father had $60 in cash and a basket of clothes. He built a prosperous business of raising select varieties of chrysanthemums which he shipped to Eastern markets under his own trade name. Six children in the family were born in the United States.
442ND Regimental (all-Nissei) Combat Team,Anzio Beachhead, 1943
Children Pledging Allegiance at San Raphael Weill Public School, San Francisco, California, 1942,Dorothea Lange
Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942: "We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men ... If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don't want them back when the war ends, either."
Constitutional Issues in KorematsuQuestions for the court to decide: • Would they accept (“take judicial notice” of) factual claims made by DeWitt about security threats posed by Japanese? • Were those factual claims strong enough to pass the “rigid/strict” scrutiny required for the government to ignore the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and its guarantee of “due process of law”? • Did the circumstances on the West Coast justify denying individual Japanese Americans a hearing and trial before being detained, thereby depriving them of “life, liberty and property”? • Could the recently decided Hirabayashi case (where Supreme Court unanimously ruled that pre-internment security concerns justified an 8 pm curfew on all West Coast Japanese residents) be used as legal precedent for the much more intrusive order to leave one’s home and enter a detention camp? • And could the order to evacuate—the only order Korematsu was charged with violating—properly be called an order for indefinite detention in internment camp? Was one by necessity, by then (May ‘42), logically and necessarily linked to the other? Or could it be more narrowly defined as simply an order to report to an assembly center with no implication of future detention?
Questions (that might be adapted for class discussion):1. What factual claims about the military necessity of Japanese American evacuation were in dispute? Did any of the justices question the military’s claims? 2. How and why could they have argued for both narrow constitutionality of this evacuation/detention order and broad ruling on “strict scrutiny” application of racial discrimination?3. What other information/background information might be helpful in answering the biggest question of how they could deliver one of the most unjust, anti-civil liberties cases in U.S. history? (e.g., Hugo Black was a former member of the Klan, though a staunch defender of civil liberties, later wrote the Pentagon Papers decision; 7/9 justices appointed by FDR)
Relocation/Life in the Camps/American Memory http://www.densho.org/sitesofshame/family.xml
