Fred Korematsu Quotes

Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born in Oakland, California, USA. He was an American civil rights activist. He was one of the many Japanese-American citizens living on the West Coast of the United States at the onset of World War II. 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 1999, he received a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.