George Takei at Fred Korematsu Day Celebration

January 30 is Fred Korematsu Day

IF YOU'RE in the San Francisco Bay Area this Jan. 30, here's an event you might want to attend.

George Takei, best know for his role in the Star Trek television series as Mr. Sulu, is the keynote speaker at a fundraising event for the Fred Korematsu Insititute. Besides being an actor, Takei is a social justice activist in his own right, so its fitting that he speak at an event honoring the civil rights hero.

Many recent immigrants from Asia often forget that many of the rights that they enjoy today are due to the struggles of minorities who were the United States before them. Korematsu is one of those heroes barely known outside of the Asian American community. He saw the injustice of Executive Order 9066, which allowed the internment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during WWII.

Fred Korematsu

From the website of the Fred Korematsu Institute:

Fred T. Korematsu was a national civil rights hero. In 1942, at the age of 23, he refused to go to the government’s incarceration camps for Japanese Americans. After he was arrested and convicted of defying the government’s order, he appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled against him, arguing that the incarceration was justified due to military necessity. 

In 1983, Prof. Peter Irons, a legal historian, together with researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, discovered key documents that government intelligence agencies had hidden from the Supreme Court in 1944. The documents consistently showed that Japanese Americans had committed no acts of treason to justify mass incarceration. With this new evidence, a pro-bono legal team that included the Asian Law Caucus re-opened Korematsu’s 40-year-old case on the basis of government misconduct. On November 10, 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned in a federal court in San Francisco. It was a pivotal moment in civil rights history. 

Korematsu remained an activist throughout his life. In 1998, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Bill Clinton. In 2010, the state of California passed the Fred Korematsu Day bill, making January 30 the first day in the US named after an Asian American. Korematsu’s growing legacy continues to inspire people of all backgrounds and demonstrates the importance of speaking up to fight injustice.

In October last year, MSNBC's Melissa Harris Perry discussed the landmark case:

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