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June 5, 2006
This Week At IsThatLegal: An Online Mini-Symposium Commemorating the Life of Mitsuye Endo, A Quiet Civil Rights Hero
Minoru Yasui, an articulate attorney, resisted the dusk-to-dawn curfew that the military imposed on American citizens of Japanese (but not German or Italian). Gordon Hirabayashi, a religious pacifist, resisted both the curfew and the military's order that he report for exclusion from the West Coast. Fred Korematsu, a scrappy fighter who wanted just to go on living his life, refused to report for exclusion.
The litigant who really scared the military and the Justice Department, though, was a young Japanese American woman named Mitsuye Endo. At the time of the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans, Endo was a twenty-two-year-old clerical worker in California's Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento. She had never been to Japan, spoke no Japanese, had been born and raised a Methodist, had a brother in the U.S. Army, and was of unquestioned loyalty to the United States. On July 12, 1942, while she sat behind the barbed wire of the "assembly center" at the Tanforan Racetrack south of San Francisco, an attorney filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court on her behalf.
Archival records from that time show quite plainly that government lawyers dreaded the Endo habeas corpus case. Most lawyers in the military, the Justice Department, and the War Relocation Authority (which ran the camps) were pretty sure they'd win the Yasui, Hirabayashi, and Korematsu cases – and they were right.
But most also feared they would lose Endo -- and they were right.
Indeed, it was their fear of a catastrophic loss in Endo (and not, for many of them, any strong sense of justice) that led them to press FDR to end the mass exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Fearing he would lose California's electoral votes, FDR would not announce the end of the exclusion before the 1944 election. But he did permit the military to make that announcement in December 1944, just before the Court ruled in Endo that the War Relocation Authority lacked the legal authority to continue to detain loyal Japanese Americans. By announcing the end of exclusion moments before the Court's decision, the government hoped to drain Endo of its significance.
Here the government was successful. Endo has been forgotten, eclipsed by the more famous Hirabayashi and Korematsu cases.
Forgotten, too, has been Mitsuye Endo, and this seems to be how she wanted it. Unlike the litigants in the three well-known cases, Endo avoided the limelight. She moved to the Chicago area after the war, married (taking the last name Tsutsumi), had children, worked, and lived a quiet life.
Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, I will post commemorations of Mitsuye Endo and her quiet legal heroism written by three leading experts on her case and its history and significance.
The first to appear – later today – will be by Greg Robinson, a professor of history at the University of Quebec at Montreal and author of, among many other things, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press 2001).
Tomorrow I will post the commemorative thoughts of Patrick Gudridge, Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law and the author of, among many other things, the important article "Remember Endo?", which appeared in the Harvard Law Review in 2003.
On Wednesday, I will post the thoughts of Professor Jerry Kang of the UCLA School of Law, whose work includes some of the most careful and probing analysis of Endo, Korematsu, and Hirabayashi -- one example of which can be found online here.
I hope you enjoy the reflections of these three scholars on the life and legacy of a remarkable, if little-known, civil rights hero.
Posted by Eric at June 5, 2006 9:40 AM
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Comments
I have done extensive research on Mitsuye Endo and her court case. I've found that most scholarship regarding her includes an error that began as a misunderstanding about the assembly centers in which the Japanese Americans were sent prior to being interned in the camps. Mitsuye was NOT at Tanforan. She, like others in Sacramento were ordered to Walerga, an assembly center located a few miles outside the city limits. The Tanforan story comes from an interview with James Purcell (her attorney-whom she never met), he, in fact, was relating a story about another client of his from the Bay Area (Tanforan was an assembly center for many of the Bay Area residents). In light of recent legislation, this is not nearly as significant as the habeas corpus issues and eventual outcome of her case. It is important, however, to get the historical details correct.
Posted by: lisa c. prince at October 11, 2006 11:18 AM