Korematsu v. United States

After Executive Order 9066, General John L. DeWitt ordered all people of Japanese ancestry out of designated West Coast areas. Korematsu’s parents abandoned their home and flower nursery to report, but he stayed. He changed his name, claimed to be of Spanish and Hawaiian descent, and even had plastic surgery on his eyes to alter his appearance. On May 30, 1942, he was arrested. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, he made his case a test of the order’s constitutionality. He was convicted in federal court in San Francisco, given probation, and sent to an assembly center in San Bruno; the appeals court affirmed.

Did the president and Congress exceed their war powers by excluding Americans of Japanese descent from the West Coast and restricting their rights?

The Court upheld the exclusion order and Korematsu’s conviction by a vote of 6–3.

Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black held that the order did not reflect racial prejudice but responded to the military imperative of protecting the West Coast from invasion, and that wartime decisions of the military, validated by Congress, deserved great deference. The Court relied heavily on its 1943 decision in Hirabayashi v. United States, which had upheld a curfew. Justice Felix Frankfurter concurred.

Three justices dissented. Justice Owen Roberts wrote that Korematsu was being punished for refusing to submit to imprisonment “based on ancestry, and solely because of his ancestry.” Justice Frank Murphy noted that people of German and Italian ancestry had been given individual investigations and hearings, and wrote that “racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life.” Justice Robert Jackson warned that by upholding the order, the Court had “validated the principle of racial discrimination,” and he likened the principle of military necessity to “a loaded weapon.”

In the early 1980s, newly discovered documents showed that government lawyers had suppressed or destroyed evidence contradicting the claim of military necessity. Korematsu and others filed petitions for a writ of coram nobis, and on November 10, 1983, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel overturned his conviction in the same San Francisco courthouse where he had been convicted.

The federal Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded in its report Personal Justice Denied that Korematsu “lies overruled in the court of history.” The 1983 ruling cleared Korematsu’s own conviction in a lower court; it did not by itself reverse the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision.