Fred Korematsu Day Pasadena – 2015

Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/31/2015
8:00 am - 12:00 pm

Location
Pasadena High School

Category(ies)

• Announcement

Since 2010, a growing of number of states have recognized Jan. 30 as Fred Korematsu Day. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has also urged the President and Congress to establish Fred Korematsu Day as a national holiday. Five states – California, Hawai’i, Utah, Illinois, and Georgia – have recognized Korematsu Day by statute, legislative resolution, or proclamation by the governor. Three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia – have legislatures that have or are considering legislative recognitions.

The City of Pasadena was the first city in Southern California to pass a resolution on February 28, 2011, recognizing an annual Fred Korematsu Day. They were shortly followed by a Resolution from the Pasadena Unified School District and Pasadena City College.

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.