Fred Korematsu 2005 Deaths

Fred Korematsu

welder who was arrested in 1942 when he refused to go to an internment camp for Japanese Americans. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction in 1944. In 1983 a federal court in San Francisco overturned the conviction, finding that the government's case had been based on false and racially biased information. In 1988 Congress passed legislation apologizing for the internments and awarded each survivor $20,000. Korematsu was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.