was an American civil rights activist who resisted the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Shortly after the Imperial Japanese Navy launched its attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of individuals of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast from their homes and their mandatory imprisonment in incarceration camps, but Korematsu instead challenged the orders and became a fugitive. The legality of Roosevelt's order was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Korematsu v. United States (1944). However, Korematsu's conviction for evading internment was overturned four decades later in US District Court, after the disclosure of new evidence challenging its necessity, which had been withheld from the courts by the U.S. government during the war. Eventually, the Korematsu ruling itself was formally condemned seventy-four years later in Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. ___ (2018). To commemorate his journey as a civil rights activist posthumously, "Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution" was observed for the first time on his 92nd birthday, January 30, 2011, by the state of California, the first such commemoration for an Asian American in the United States. In 2015, Virginia passed legislation to make it the second state to permanently recognize each January 30 as Fred Korematsu Day. The Fred T. Korematsu Institute was founded in 2009 to carry on Korematsu's legacy as a civil rights advocate by educating and advocating for civil liberties for all communities. Youth Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born in Oakland, California, on January 30, 1919, the third of four sons to Japanese parents Kakusaburo Korematsu and Kotsui Aoki, who immigrated to the United States in 1905. Korematsu resided continuously in Oakland from his birth until the time of his arrest. He attended public schools, participated in the Castlemont High School (Oakland, California) tennis and swim teams, and worked in his family's flower nursery in nearby San Leandro, California. He encountered racism in high school when a U.S. Army recruiting officer was handing out recruiting flyers to Korematsu's non-Japanese friends. The officer told Korematsu, "We have orders not to accept you." Even his girlfriend Ida Boitano's Italian parents felt that people of Japanese descent were inferior and unfit to mix with white people. World War II When called for military duty under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, Korematsu was formally rejected by