Korematsu v. United States

1. In his majority opinion, Justice Hugo Black divulges what he and his colleagues determined were the reasons the government used to justify the decision to send Japanese-Americans away from the West Coast to internment camps: to promote the safety of American citizens during wartime. Early on in the opinion, Black writes, “exclusion of those of Japanese origin was deemed necessary because…it was impossible to [segregate] the disloyal from the loyal…” and, later, says that about five thousand Japanese-American refused to pledge allegiance to the U.S. instead of to Japan. The government felt the threat of another Japanese attack on American shores, this time aided by citizens still loyal to the Japanese emperor, was too great to allow for their residency in states along the West Coast. In Black’s interpretation, the government acted with sound ethics and power “because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures,” not due to racial motivation. 

2. When the military acted based on fear rather than rational thought, they caused a great deal of strife to the displaced Japanese-American population. In Justice Frank Murphy’s dissenting opinion, he explicitly states that the Fifth Amendment rights of the Japanese-Americans sent away from the West Coast following the military’s exclusion order were violated. The Fifth Amendment states that “no person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” In the opinion, Murphy further states that the exclusion order “further deprives these individuals of their constitutional rights to live and work where they will, to establish a home where they choose and to move about freely,” stressing the importance of acting without consideration to the race or nationality of the victims – especially since there were plenty of German- and Italian-Americans who were likely just as ready to claim their disloyalty to the United States.

3. I do not think that the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II was constitutionally appropriate. Not only were the Fifth Amendment rights of the displaced violated, but also those granted in the Fourteenth Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Since Fred Korematsu – and many like him – were U.S. citizens and still were forced to vacate, simply because of their heritage, it is much easier to paint this injustice as racially based, making it just as heinous an act as the rounding up of “inferior” persons in Germany at around the same time. As Justice Murphy stated in his dissent, “racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life.” To relegate an entire group of individuals – many of them legitimate American citizens – to exile in the name of protecting the public is just plain wrong. A security measure that the federal government could have adopted would be to simply increase the anti-aircraft personnel and weaponry along the West Coast. This military action would have been more appropriate to the danger presented. The Japanese had previously attacked the U.S. on their own turf via the air at Pearl Harbor, so it shouldn’t have been a great leap of logic to assume that they might attempt a similar strike in the future. Increasing the anti-aircraft defenses along the coast would also likely have cost less than it did to move such a large number of people away from their homes and into internment camps, as described in this uncommonly told tale about the Japanese and WWII. While there might still have been calls from the public for exclusion of Japanese-Americans, this defensive action would have been far less discriminatory and would provide citizens with peace of mind knowing that their border to the sea was well-protected.

Reference

Korematsu v. United States. 323 U.S. 214. Supreme Court of the United States. 1944. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 27 Nov. 2013.