JAPANESE-AMERICAN INTERNMENT

CHAPTER 7 - IT'S CONSTITUTIONAL!?!?!?

A few Japanese-Americans challenged the right of the government to uproot its citizens and send them to internment camps. One of those cases, filed by Fred Korematsu, addressed the key issue: Can American citizens be summarily relocated to detention camps based solely on their race? Aren't there constitutional protections against such arbitrary actions?

The great Supreme Court jurist Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion of the court in the Korematsu case. That opinion still stands today. It wasn't Justice Black's finest hour. He held that military necessity justified the relocation.

Compulsory exclusion of large groups of citizens from their homes, except under circumstances of direct 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.

Not all the justices agreed that American citizens of Japanese ancestry posed such a threat. Frank Murphy wrote a blistering dissent and was joined in his opinion by two others.

I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States.

Many Americans believed the internment camps were wrong. By 1980, Congress held hearings on the issue and heard from many witnesses whose lives had been completely - albeit "constitutionally" - disrupted. "Personal Justice Denied" was the 1983 result of the Congressional hearings. The report condemned what had happened to loyal American citizens and noted that the Supreme Court decisions - including the Korematsu case - had been "overruled in the court of history."

It isn't clear whether the "court of history" has reached the same conclusion regarding another American action against the Empire of Japan: the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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