Fred Korematsu, the unassuming Oakland draftsman who unsuccessfully challenged the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II -- but was vindicated 40 years later -- died Wednesday of respiratory failure at the Marin County home of his daughter.
Korematsu was 86.
To many Japanese-Americans and other civil libertarians, Korematsu was a civil rights icon who risked not only the legal wrath of his own government, but the scorn of his own people when in 1944 he challenged the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans.
Korematsu's stirring legal saga was the subject of an Emmy-winning PBS documentary in 2002: He was one of four sons of Japanese immigrants who owned a flower nursery. When ordered to prepare to go to detention camp, Korematsu refused because he believed that Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt, violated his constitutional rights.
Korematsu went into hiding briefly, his facial features altered by plastic surgery. He was arrested in San Leandro.
In May 1942, he was convicted in federal court of violating the presidential order. He appealed.
In the now infamous 1944 case, Korematsu vs. United States, cited in every constitutional law textbook, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the mass detention of Japanese-Americans was justified by national security concerns.
It was a deep disappointment to young Korematsu, who was in his 20s at the time. But unexpectedly in 1982, three young Japanese-American lawyers in San Francisco approached the feisty Korematsu and convinced him to take his case back to court. -- Karen Kai, Don Tamaki and Dale Minami were energized by their own parents and grandparents who had been interned.
The following year, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of U.S. District Court in San Francisco, overturned Korematsu's conviction, citing government misconduct through suppression, alteration and burning of evidence, race discrimination, lack of military necessity, and manifest injustice. ``We were not only trying to reverse a very bad legal precedent,'' recalled Don Tamaki, ``but we were also trying to vindicate our our families.''
To Tamaki, ``the case represented the trials that Japanese Americans never had.''
``Fred was a giant in our community and a man who fought not only for the civil rights for Japanese-Americans but for all Americans,'' Minami said. ``He took an unpopular stand at a time when the country was in crisis. And he withstood criticism and ostracism 40 years later.''
Said Kai, ``There was truly an understanding that this case was a historic one,'' she said. ``It had tremendous meaning on a personal level, but also in a much larger sense in terms of constitutional law and civil rights.''
Korematsu's case paved the way for the landmark 1988 Civil Liberties Act, when the U.S. government acknowledged that the detention of Japanese-Americans was wrong, and apologized.
In 1998, President Clinton awarded Korematsu with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civil honor.
