COUNTERPUNCH LETTERS : Foe of Internment

I was very pleased to read Fred Okrand’s history of the American Civil Liberties Union’s opposition to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II (“ACLU Posed Challenge to War Internments,” Jan. 9), in response to the earlier inaccurate account by Carl B. Pearlston Jr. (“Not a Shining Chapter in ACLU History,” Dec. 26).

However, no history of this period would be complete without citing the important role of Ernest Besig, then-executive director of the ACLU of Northern California, in bringing the Korematsu case to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943.

As Fred Korematsu still often recounts, when he was arrested in Oakland for refusing to obey the relocation and internment order, the first person to visit him in jail was Besig. Although a stranger, Besig was no stranger to fighting injustice, and he offered Korematsu the services of the ACLU to challenge Executive Order 9066.

Although, as Okrand points out, the ACLU of Northern California lost the case in 1943, 50 years later the writ of corum nobus --filed on behalf on Korematsu by a coalition of legal groups of which the ACLU of Northern California was a part--successfully overturned Korematsu’s wartime conviction.

And Besig was a thorn in the side of the whole internment policy--he frequently visited internees in the California camps, challenging substandard conditions and advocating for the detainees’ freedom of expression; he also represented individuals whom the U.S. government had singled out for harsher treatment, including resisters and renunciants.

These efforts during a period of intense xenophobia when so many groups and individuals accepted the internment of 120,000 people based solely on their ethnic heritage should not go unmentioned.

DOROTHY EHRLICH

Executive Director

American Civil Liberties Union

of Northern California

San Francisco