Five months after the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, allowing the Army to round up anyone of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast and send them to internment camps. They were allowed 10 days to sell houses, businesses and belongings. 120,000 Japanese American men, women and children were sent to camps.
A University of Washington student and American-born Quaker, Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi, defied the federal curfew and evacuation orders, claiming his constitutional rights as a U.S. citizen.
Forty years later, Hirabayashi was vindicated when a federal appellate court said his 1940s convictions were racist. Hirabayashi refused to obey the curfew and exclusion orders and went to the FBI to say so. At his trial, the judge felt military law superseded the Constitution. The Supreme Court admitted the curfew was a form of racial discrimination, but said it was not unconstitutional in a time of war. He was sentenced to 90 days at a work camp near Tucson, Arizona, for violating the curfew and failing to report to the internment camp.
His conviction for violating the curfew and internment order remained on the books until more active Sansei, or third-generation Japanese Americans, brought the issue to the conscience of a less-frightened nation. Their successful lobbying forced Congress in 1987 to pay each surviving internee $20,000. But political leaders stopped short of acknowledging misconduct or offering an apology. So Hirabayashi, at 64, asked the federal courts to reopen his 40-year-old case to settle the curfew and internment issues once and for all.
In 1986, after 43 years, a U.S. District Court reversed Hirabayashi's conviction for failing to register for internment, saying the government withheld information from the Supreme Court that proved internment was based on prejudice in 1943 in order to justify it.
Recently, the former federal prison camp in Arizona, where Hirabayashi and 44 other Japanese Americans who took stands against injustice were housed, was renamed Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site.