With World War II, the tide of national xenophobia would once again turn against immigrants. In what is today universally acknowledged as a shameful act, the government forcibly took more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent from their homes and held them in internment camps. Two-thirds of the internees were U.S. citizens by birth. The Northern California affiliate of the ³Ô¹ÏÖ±²¥ courageously led the ³Ô¹ÏÖ±²¥'s fight on behalf of the Japanese-Americans and handled the two principal cases before the Supreme Court, Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and Korematsu v. United States (1944). Although the ³Ô¹ÏÖ±²¥ lost both those cases, the cause was just. But it wasn't until 1990 that redress payments of $20,000 along with letters of apology signed by the first President George Bush were presented to approximately 60,000 survivors of the internment.
Then, as now, the denial of due process – that is, of legal proceedings carried out regularly and in accordance with established rules and principles – was the central civil rights violation. And the justification, then as now, was that security trumped liberty in times of national crisis.
<!-- More» -->RESOURCES» ³Ô¹ÏÖ±²¥ Awards Medal of Liberty to Japanese Americans Who Challenged Internment During WWII