Out of 120,000, only three Japanese-Americans refused to be badgered or to surrender their rights — Quaker pacifist Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi, a former Eagle Scout and honor student; Minoru Yasui, a Portland, Oregon, lawyer; and Fred Korematsu, a welder in the San Leandro, California, shipyards. The most adamant, Hirabayashi, remained true to his ideal that rights belong to all Americans, regardless of race or national heritage. Acting on the advice of a Quaker lawyer, Hirabayashi disobeyed curfews for Asians, then turned himself over to the FBI for refusing internment and breaking curfew. Hirabayashi drew a jail term. Other Japanese Americans ostracized him for rebelling.
On October 20, 1942, Hirabayashi went to trial, where the judge refused him due process on the issue of violation of civil rights and found him guilty of breaking the law. Hirabayashi, assured that an appeal to the Supreme Court would end mass internment, opted to go to prison. On June 21, 1943, he discovered that his supposition was faulty — the Supreme Court upheld internment as a necessary emergency measure in the interest of national security. Only Justice Frank Murphy dissented from the majority opinion by comparing internment to the Nazi oppression of Jews.
Justice Murphy's most famous civil rights stand came in 1944 with Korematsu v. United States, a case in which he labeled as racist the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. However, his support for Constitutional rights did not spare Hirabayashi from the injustice of internment, compounded by having to pay his own way to Camp Tule. It was only after Roosevelt's third election that pressure to release Japanese Americans brought about a rescinding of Executive Order 9066 and the release of internees who passed the loyalty tests.
