On April 2, 1942, a group of nine CA State Library employees of Japanese ancestry (pictured below) was dismissed by the Personnel Board. Today, Jan. 30, we celebrate Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution. How are these facts related? Let's return to a tumultuous time in history.
First, why were these employees dismissed? Due to the repercussions of Executive Order 9066, issued by President Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942. The order allowed the gov't to incarcerate thousands of citizens and legal residents based on nothing but their Japanese ancestry.
Where does Fred Korematsu come in? Mr. Korematsu was an American civil rights activist who stood up to the U.S. government’s wrongful incarceration of over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast during World War II.
Even without support from his family or community, he disobeyed the government’s orders, and as a result, spent over two years in various prisons and wartime incarceration sites. His case went to the Supreme Court, and in 1944 the Court ruled against him, claiming the mass incarceration was a “military necessity.” Nearly 40 years later, the gov't finally issued apologies and reparations to camp survivors, and in 1998 President Clinton awarded Mr. Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In the same year (1998), California launched the CA Civil Liberties Public Education Program. The program, managed by the CA State Library, funds projects that educate the public about civil liberties injustices carried out based on an individual or group’s race, national origin, immigration status, religion, gender, or sexual orientation (including, but not limited to, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II).
400+ projects have been funded since the program’s birth, including video/audio broadcasts, books, graphic novels, photo collections and exhibits, museum displays, arts performances, material preservation, educational guides, websites, public art and monuments, and more.
New rounds of funding become available each year, and project submissions for this year are open until April 14, 2023. To learn more about the program, visit library.ca.gov/grants/civil-liberties.
