He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders-as inevitably it must-determined that they should have the power to do just this. Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers-and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term implies-we are dealing specifically with nothing but an exclusion order. To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue. Our task would be simple, our duty clear, were this a case involving the imprisonment of a loyal citizen in a concentration camp because of racial prejudice. It is said that we are dealing here with the case of imprisonment of a citizen in a concentration camp solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States.
We uphold the exclusion order as of the time it was made and when the petitioner violated it. . Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions racial antagonism never can. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. Ll legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect.
Excerpt: Majority Opinion, Justice Hugo Black
0 kommentar(er)
