Japanese Internment in the United States

Japanese Internment in relation to Crime and Race

Japanese Internment is included in the Encyclopedia of Race and Crime (1), beginning with: When the Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered World War II. The sudden and deliberate attack not only mobilized the U.S. military into action, but federal, state, and local authorities began the process of moving Americans of Japanese ancestry away from the West Coast and Hawai. This section describes the process of Japanese internment, from the first wave of roundups to the return of Japanese Americans to their homes after the war.

In addition, it briefly traces the legacy of the internment and discusses redress and reparations that occurred in the latter part of the 20th century. While the U.S. military mobilized for action against the forces of the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan), local authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation began to round up Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) leaders in the Japanese American communities in Hawaii and on the mainland.

Internment of Japanese Americans

Information about the Japanese legal system is available here.

World War II brought discrimination against another racial group to the forefront. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, U.S. military officials forced Japanese Americans on the West Coast to obey curfews and leave their homes.

President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Two-thirds of them were natural-born U.S. citizens.

Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi challenged this treatment of Japanese Americans, arguing that it violated the Equal Protection Clause.

From 1882 to 1944, approximately forty-seven hundred persons were lynched across the United States. Of these, about seventy-three percent were African American. In many southern states, more than ninety percent of the lynching victims were black. The prevalence of lynching despite the Fourteenth Amendment helped lead to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, That same year, in United States v. Shipp, the Supreme Court held a Tennessee sheriff and his deputies in criminal contempt for allowing the lynching of a black man whose case was being reviewed by the Court.

Justice Thurgood Marshall later said that the Shipp case “was perhaps the first instance in which the Court demonstrated that the Fourteenth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause have any substantive meaning to people of the African American race.”

However, the Supreme Court upheld the military orders in Korematsu v. United States (1944), saying they were not based on racial animosity but on the fact that Japan was an enemy. Yet as Justice Robert Jackson pointed out in his dissent, Americans of German and Italian ancestry were not treated similarly. In 1983, Fred Korematsu’s criminal conviction was overturned because his attorney Peter Irons discovered that the U.S. solicitor general had lied to the Supreme Court in 1944. The solicitor general knowingly misinformed the Court that the U.S. military had evidence of disloyalty by Japanese Americans, but there was none. In 1988, Congress apologized to and compensated survivors of the internment camps.

Korematsu v. United States

This is the notorious 1944 Supreme Court decision that upheld the forcible internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

At SCOTUSblog, Lyle Denniston has an interesting post on this issue, mentioning:

“Lawyers who worked for years — ultimately successfully — to clear the names of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry who were convicted of violating government detention policy during World War II are trying to persuade the Obama administration to join in wiping off the books the Supreme Court rulings of that time, upholding those detentions. The most famous of those rulings – often reviled – was the 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States.

The lawyers did so in a letter last week to U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., attempting to shape the government’s response to a new Supreme Court appeal that attacks the Korematsu decision. They want the government to formally repudiate that precedent, and tell the Court that it is no part of the justification today for detention of U.S. citizens during the war on terrorism.

The new case is Hedges v. Obama (docket 13-758), an attempt to revive a constitutional challenge to Congress’s recent support of presidential power to detain suspected terrorists….

While Congress was debating that measure, a controversy arose over how far it would go, if at all, to permit the detention without trial of U.S. citizens captured inside the U.S. In a compromise effort to resolve that dispute, Congress included a statement that now seems ambiguous about what was intended. In the Hedges case, the claim is that the statement can be read to rely upon the Korematsu decision as support for such detentions — something that those challengers want to have clearly refuted.

Here is the language of the compromise provision: “Authorities. — Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.”

What concerns the challengers in the Hedges case, and the lawyers who wrote to the Solicitor General, is the phrase “existing law or authorities.” In the petition in the Supreme Court seeking review of the Second Circuit’s decision, this was included as one of the questions at issue: “To the extent that the Second Circuit opinion holds that Koremasu is among the ‘existing law and authorities’…that relate to military detention of citizens and legal residents, should Korematsu be overruled?”

Resources

Notes and References

1. Entry about Japanese Internment in the Encyclopedia of Race and Crime

See Also