We could do a daily feature on the creative doodles Google posts, but today’s is especially poignant given the political climate.
It features a cartoon image of Fred Korematsu, an activist who fought against the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. It would have been his 98th birthday today.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942 in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Korematsu, the son of Japanese immigrants, refused to go.
He did not want to be separated from his Italian-American girlfriend. He was arrested later that year and was sent to the Tanforan internment facility, a former racetrack south of San Francisco, California.
A month later, in June 1941, Korematsu, with the help of the ACLU, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government for violating his constitutional rights. The court ruled against him, and he was sentenced to five months probation. Korematsu appealed his case all the way up to the Supreme Court, which also ruled against him in 1944.
Thirty-nine years later, with the help of a law professor and a team of mostly Asian-American lawyers, a federal judge reversed the decision. In 1998, President Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in March 2005.