Civil Liberties Tragedy – Supreme Court Upholds Japanese-American Evacuation
In the case of Korematsu v. United States, decided on this day, the Supreme Court upheld the evacuation of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast during World War II. In this decision and in an earlier case, Hirabayashi v. United States, on June 21, 1943, which upheld a curfew against Japanese-Americans, the Court expressed deference to military authority during wartime.
The treatment of the Japanese-Americans in World War II is widely regarded as the greatest civil liberties tragedies in American history.
But on the same day, the court in Ex parte Endo, ruled that the government could not detain people it conceded were loyal to the U.S. The decision effectively forced the government to release all detained Japanese-Americans against whom there was no evidence of disloyalty or criminal activity.
Unlike the first Japanese-American evacuation and internment case, Hirabayashi, which was unanimous, three Justices dissented in Korematsu. Particularly important is Justice Frank Murphy’s dissent (see below), which condemned the racism in the government’s program.
The Korematsu decision was limited to the order to “exclude” the Japanese-Americans from the West Coast, and did not address the detention of the Japanese-Americans. In a separate decision on this day, Ex Parte Endo, the Court ruled that the government could not detain people it conceded were loyal to the United States (see December 18, 1944).
In a bizarre turn of events, Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court invalidated the Korematsu decision on June 26, 2018, seventy four years after it was decided. Roberts wrote that “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day itwas decided, has been overruled in the court of history,and—to be clear—’has no place in law under the Constitution’ [quoting Justice Robert Jackson’s dissent in Korematsu].” Robert’s action came in response to reference to Korematsu in the dissent in Trump v. Hawaii, in which the Court upheld President Donald Trump’s “anti-Muslim” immigration ban on June 26, 2018. Oddly, Roberts stated that Korematsu “has nothing to do with this case,” which is true since that case dealt with the evacuation of American citizens and not restrictions on the immigration of foreign nationals to the U.S.
Justice Hugo L. Black’s majority opinion: “Compulsory exclusion of large groups of citizens from their homes, except under circumstances of direst emergency and peril, is inconsistent with our basic governmental institutions. But when, under conditions of modern warfare, our shores are threatened by hostile forces, the power to protect must be commensurate with the threatened danger.”
Justice Frank Murphy’s dissent: “Such exclusion goes over ‘the very brink of constitutional power,’ and falls into the ugly abyss of racism.”
Learn more at the Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education: http://korematsuinstitute.org/institute/aboutfred/