Most Active Stories KRWG.ORG-The Region's Home Page Wed January
4, 2012 Gordon Hirabayashi Has Died; He Refused To Go To WWII
Internment Camp "This order for the mass evacuation of all
persons of Japanese descent denies them the right to live,"
Seattle native Gordon Hirabayashi wrote in 1942. "I consider it
my duty to maintain the democratic standards for which this
nation lives. Therefore, I must refuse this order of
evacuation." With that, Hirabayashi became one of just a handful
of Japanese-Americans who defied the government's move to put
more than 100,000 of them in detention camps following the
attack on Pearl Harbor. For his refusal, he was imprisoned more
than a year. It took four decades for Hirabayashi to be
vindicated, with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that the
internment policy "had been based on political expediency, not
on any risk to national security," as The Associated Press
writes. By then, Hirabayashi had become a respected sociologist
and a hero in the Japanese-American community. Monday,