Fred Korematsu: Google celebrates civil rights hero who fought Japanese internment

'If you have the feeling that something is wrong, don’t be afraid to speak up,' Mr Korematsu famously said

The portrait of Fred Korematsu is seen during its presentation to the National Portrait Gallery February 2, 2012 in Washington, DC Fred Korematsu was a US citizen of Japanese ancestry who was imprisoned for defying a relocation order (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Google is celebrating the life of a pioneering civil rights activist who fought against the exclusion of people based on their race.

Fred Korematsu was 22 years old when more than 115,000 Japanese-American people sent into incarceration because of a controversial Executive Order – number 9066 – that was signed in 1942 by Franklin D Roosevelt. It was an Executive Order that also introduced the travel ban on Muslim people from seven countries, and went into effect over the weekend.

But rather than voluntarily be moved to an internment camp, Mr Korematsu went into hiding. That led to him being arrested in 1942 and convicted, after which he and his family were sent to the Central Utah War Relocation Center until the war was over.

That was despite the best efforts of organisations like the American Civil Liberties Union, which fought to take the case to the Supreme Court and then lost. The ACLU has been active in fighting against the new Executive Order, signed by Mr Trump, which meant that many people from various countries were held indefinitely in US airports.

The illegality and the wrongness of the executive order were eventually recognised by the US, which ended it in 1976. Mr Korematsu had his conviction overturned in 1983.

Five years later, Ronald Reagan introduced the The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, and as he did so he cited "racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and a lack of political leadership" for the internments.

A post on the Fred Korematsu Institute makes clear the parallels between what happened during the war and what is happening today.

"Some people think that the incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II happened a long long time ago, and since the verdict in the Korematsu case was vacated, everything is okay now, and this could never happen again," the post reads.

"However, after the events of 9/11, there has been an escalation of hate crimes and racial profiling—by 1,600 percent—all around the country targeting Muslim and Arab Americans, and those perceived to be Muslim and Arab Americans (like Sikh Americans, for whom 2 out of 3 children who wear patak or turbans are bullied in schools)."

The post, written by activist Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, goes on to describe the kind of hate crimes and discrimination that have happened to those people. Both Google and the post draw attention to a famous quotation from Mr Karamatsu: “If you have the feeling that something is wrong, don’t be afraid to speak up.”