By Associated Press
San Francisco — The University of San Francisco this past weekend honored a man who resisted internment during World War II, when tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were ordered to relocate to camps.
Fred Korematsu received an honorary degree in humane letters from the university’s School of Law on Sunday afternoon, according to university spokeswoman Monica Leifer.
As a young man, Korematsu ran away from his hometown of Oakland when the infamous Executive Order 9066 was issued, forcing 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps. He was arrested and convicted in 1944, but the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983 reversed its earlier upholding of that wartime conviction.
The lawsuit Korematsu vs. United States became a landmark, Leifer said, and helped pave the way for the 1988 Civil Liberties Act in which the U.S. government apologized for the internment and compensated each internee with $20,000. |
