Published:
Thursday, April 23, 2015
April 23 would have been Gordon Hirabayashi’s 97th birthday. He was an American hero with a long and arduous journey of justice.
Hirabayashi defied military curfew and exclusion orders authorized under Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of 120,000-plus Japanese Americans on the West Coast during World War II. In 1942, Hirabayashi, a senior at UW, turned himself over to the FBI for violating the federally imposed curfew. He was convicted and appealed his conviction all the way to the US Supreme Court, where he lost.
Forty-three years later, Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Min Yasui sought redress by filing coram nobis cases (with support from the ACLU), and all three had successful results; coram nobis is a writ issued by a court to correct a prior fundamental legal error and is used to remedy a serious injustice. More importantly, in Hirabayashi’s case, a finding was made that the U.S. charges of Japanese American espionage and disloyalty were false, making the federal government’s military necessity argument for the massive incarceration moot. The incarceration was based solely on their ancestry.
Hirabayashi’s legacy of justice is now more relevant than ever. Extensive calls for “Black Lives Matter!” against police abuse and hate crimes targeting Arab American and Muslim communities after the 9-11 terrorist attacks tell us to be vigilant and remember the lessons of the past.
American amnesia and reduced civic education in our schools make it challenging to protect our civil liberties. Two current initiatives give us hope.
Part of the budget pending before the State Legislature in Olympia is a proposal to allocate $250,000 to the KIP TOKUDA MEMORIAL Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. The Fund is intended to continue the development of educational materials and activities for K-12 students about the unconstitutional incarceration and heroic military service of Japanese Americans during World War II. The legislature passed a bill in 2000 establishing this grant program.
In Seattle, the Interim Community Development Association is memorializing Gordon Hirabayashi’s legacy by naming its newest development “Hirabayashi Place.” The 96-unit affordable housing development is located on 4th and Main Street, creating a new gateway in a neighborhood that had been the center of Seattle’s thriving Japanese American community prior to WWII.
The educational and art installations on the building façade, the property and the main entry make visible Gordon Hirabayashi’s and the Japanese American community’s struggles. On the north wall of Hirabayashi Place, it boldly prompts the question of our time, “What does justice look like?”
The public opening of Hirabayashi Place will be in early 2016. The building will stand as a beacon for justice, as a reminder to never forget.
Resources:
http://interimicda.org/legacyofjustice/ [email protected]
http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Gordon_Hirabayashi/
http://encyclopedia.densho.org/American_Civil_Liberties_Union/
http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Coram_nobis_cases/
https://www.aclu.org/blog/defending-targets-discrimination/remembering-gordon-hirabayashi
