When you think about World War II, often the first thing that comes to mind is the atrocities committed by the German Nazi Party in the Holocaust. Many of the most horrendous examples of the Nazi’s reign can be found in the human rights violations and dehumanization that took place in the concentration camps. Of course, it may come as a tremendous surprise to many of us in the class that the same breed of dehumanization occurred within the history of the United States. Further, it may strike larger concerns that in the midst of World War II (which was just 75 years ago) the Supreme Court decided that such an occurrence was constitutional and permissible within the law.
In response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II, the U.S. government decided to require Japanese-Americans to move into relocation camps as a matter of national security. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor. A Japanese-American man living in San Leandro, Fred Korematsu, chose to stay at his residence rather than obey the order to relocate. Korematsu was arrested and convicted of violating the order. He responded by arguing that Executive Order 9066 violated the Fifth Amendment. The Ninth Circuit affirmed Korematsu’s conviction.
The question at hand is whether or not the United States government (via the Ninth Circuit, President, and Congress) overstepped their bounds in the ruling and executive order. Additionally, the Court was analyzing whether or not such an exclusionary ruling violated additional Amendments to the Constitution (i.e the 14th Amendment).
In an opinion written by Justice Hugo Black (who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and then a strong advocate for Brown v. Board later in his life), the Court ruled that the evacuation order violated by Korematsu was valid. This meant that the internment and executive order was valid and that the discrimination was legal. The majority found that the Executive Order did not show racial prejudice but rather responded to the strategic imperative of keeping the U.S. and particularly the West Coast (the region nearest Japan) secure from invasion.
The Court relied heavily on a 1941 decision, Hirabayashi v. U.S., which addressed similar issues. Black argued that the validation of the military’s decision by Congress merited even more deference. Justice Frankfurter concurred, writing that the “martial necessity arising from the danger of espionage and sabotage” warranted the military’s evacuation order. Justice Jackson dissented, arguing that the exclusion order legitimized racism that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
This means a great deal to the nation’s history. Thanks to the activism of Japanese-Americans like Yuri Kochiyama (who was given a Google Doodle treatment recently in honor of her 95th birthday), in 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered every Japanese-American interned in the camps during the war a formal apology and $20,000 in compensation, Story Hinckley writes for the Christian Science Monitor. Considering this, we may have done a bit to make up for our errors, though coming to terms with this and not forgetting the horrendous history allows us to not repeat history.
Certainly one of the more interesting Supreme Court cases throughout history. I especially appreciated your likening of this moment in U.S. history to Nazi Germany. Although I don’t think it’d be fair to say that our internment camps were as bad as concentration camps, I do think it’s important to note how there was a similar depriving of human and civil rights that occurred.
This is a very unique and interesting blog post. I appreciate you writing in a way that is simple yet easy to grasp the greater topic. You did a good job with comparing the camps to concentration camps as that is exactly what they were.