Fred Okrand, 84; Fought Key ACLU Battles

Fred Okrand, former longtime legal director of the ACLU of Southern California who represented Japanese Americans imprisoned in World War II relocation camps and for many years helped lead a courtroom battle to integrate Los Angeles city schools through busing, died Monday at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Woodland Hills. He was 84.

Okrand, who suffered from cancer and had a stroke during the past year, died of natural causes, according to his son, Dean.

Okrand was the ACLU’s first legal director. During his six-decade association with the civil liberties group, he argued at least four cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and took several others before the California Supreme Court.

“He was the force behind some of the most significant constitutional challenges in our nation,” said ACLU Executive Director Ramona Ripston.

Okrand defended Jehovah’s Witnesses’ right to hand out religious pamphlets, teachers who refused to sign loyalty oaths during the McCarthy era, and freedom of speech for Communists and Nazis.

He also successfully argued that law enforcement officers have no right to spy on the lawful activities of citizens, a case that laid the foundation for a spying lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department that was settled in the 1980s.

His most enduring battle was one he helped wage for people of Japanese ancestry whose rights were violated by the U.S. government during World War II.

Until just before his death, he was working on a case involving another dark but little-known chapter of history--the internment by the United States of Japanese Latin Americans.

Okrand was the son of a Boyle Heights gas station owner and was born and raised in East Los Angeles. He attended Roosevelt High School, where he was head yell leader and a top scholar. He graduated at 15 and entered UCLA, where he earned a bachelor’s degree.

He married his high school sweetheart, Mimi Margolin, the day before he graduated from USC’s law school in 1940. She survives him, along with Dean, another son, Marc, and two grandchildren.

Okrand joined the law firm of Gallagher & Wirin but left after the United States entered World War II and sent 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent on the West Coast into isolated relocation camps.

The law firm represented a number of labor unions that favored the internment, but Okrand opposed it, calling it “discrimination purely based on race.”

He and Al Wirin, one of the firm’s partners, left to work for the ACLU, which Okrand had heard about from a leaflet someone had left on a bus seat.

In August 1942, he, Wirin and a third lawyer, E.W. Camp, filed habeas corpus petitions in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the internments on behalf of two Japanese Americans.

He received threatening letters for championing the Japanese Americans’ cause, but “he ignored them,” his wife said. “He just felt it was such an injustice.”

Because of sharp divisions within the Japanese American community about how to proceed, the plaintiffs withdrew from the case before it could be argued.

The ACLU and the American Friends Service Committee were the only two organizations that formally protested the internments, which were popular at the time. Even some ACLU members did not oppose the detention camps, Okrand recalled in a 1995 article in The Times.

During the war, Okrand spent four years in the Army, serving in the European theater. When he returned, he and Wirin successfully represented Japanese Americans who sought to regain their citizenship after renouncing it because of oppressive conditions in one of the camps. The court ruled that their renunciations had been coerced and therefore were invalid.

Because he charged nothing for his work for the ACLU, Okrand supported his family by taking on unsympathetic clients. He and Wirin handled civil liberties cases for such reputed gangsters as Frank Carbo, Mickey Cohen and Louis Dragna.

He finally assumed a paid position with the ACLU in 1972 as its first legal director.

From the 1960s through the early ‘80s, his most consuming case involved the fight over school busing.

Okrand lived in the San Fernando Valley, where most schools offered conditions superior to those in inner-city areas: They were air-conditioned, had experienced teachers and classroom seats to spare. In other parts of the sprawling Los Angeles school district, classrooms were dilapidated, overcrowded and staffed by undertrained teachers.

Okrand was among those who believed mandatory busing was the solution to the inequity.

In 1963, the ACLU joined forces with the NAACP to file a complaint on behalf of the parents of Mary Ellen Crawford and other black and Latino students, alleging that the district had intentionally caused the segregation of its schools.

The case led to three combative years of court-ordered busing that ended in 1981 after a state initiative passed that barred state courts from ordering busing as a remedy for segregation.

The legal wrangling continued until 1989, when the NAACP said it could no longer afford to press the case.

“I understand and sympathize with those kids and parents who don’t want to get on the bus,” Okrand said in 1984. “I understand, but I think it’s wrong. The civil liberties issue here is the right to an equal education. And there comes a time when the school board has to say these kids aren’t getting an education and they have to go to this other school, even if it means a bus ride.”

He called the busing case his “greatest judicial disappointment.”

Okrand retired in 1984, but he continued to work on cases as the ACLU’s emeritus legal director.

His last case was a class-action lawsuit filed in 1996 on behalf of 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans who were abducted from their homes and sent to internment camps in the United States. The lawsuit alleged that they were to be used in civilian prisoner exchanges with Japan.

The Latin American Japanese sought redress from the U.S. government and a formal apology under the 1988 reparations law, but their applications were denied because they were not U.S. citizens and legal residents at the time of their detention.

The case was settled in 1998 when the government agreed to send each survivor or their heirs a letter of apology from then-President Clinton, as well as $5,000 each in reparation.

As co-counsel, Okrand conducted research for the legal brief, attended court hearings and generally provided the much younger lead attorney with historical perspective.

“He brought so much experience and passion to the case,” said Los Angeles attorney Robin Toma, who, unlike Okrand, had not lived through the World War II years. “I felt like I had this anchor in history and this moral and legal authority that gave me confidence in confronting the injustice of our government then and now. I will miss him deeply,” Toma said.

A memorial service will be announced later. Donations in Okrand’s memory may be sent to the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, 1616 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026.