I WAS FRED KOREMATSU’S LAWYER. HE CHANGED MY LIFE.

Each of us has days that changed our lives forever, for better or worse, indelibly seared into our memories. For 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry — about two-thirds of them nativeborn American citizens — a day none could forget was Feb. 19, 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing West Coast military officials to “exclude” this entire ethnic group from their homes and communities, forcing them into desolate, hastily constructed concentration camps (a term Roosevelt himself used) spread beyond California to Idaho and as far east as Arkansas.

None of those — including women, children and the elderly — who were surrounded by barbedwire fences and guarded by armed troops had been charged with any crime such as espionage or sabotage, the pretext for their incarceration during World War II.

Life changed further for Fred Korematsu, a 23-year-old shipyard welder who was born in Oakland with native Japanese parents but had never set foot in Japan, on May 30, 1942. Fred had earlier said goodbye to his parents and three brothers as they left behind their home and flower nursery for a desert camp in Utah, not knowing when or if he would see them again. A headstrong young man with an Italian American girlfriend and a strong belief in his rights as an American citizen, Fred decided to ignore the exclusion order, and planned to move with his girlfriend to an inland state, get married and live freely.

But on that Memorial Day, as Fred was waiting for her on a street corner near his home in San Leandro, a small town bordering Oakland, cops responded to a tip from someone who had recognized him, pulled up and arrested him for “looking like the enemy,” as Fred later said. After a quick trial in San Francisco’s federal court, Fred was shipped to the Utah camp to join his family, while his appeal from his conviction, aided by American Civil Liberties Union lawyers, slowly traveled to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

Six of nine justices upheld Fred’s conviction on Dec. 18, 1944, a day of infamy for the court. Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black asserted that “Korematsu was not excluded” from his home state “because of hostility to him or his race,” but because “military necessity” required the incarceration of the entire group. In a classic case of “blaming the victims,” Black cited laws prohibiting “alien” Japanese people — most of whom had been living in the U.S. for decades — from owning farmland as “intensifying their solidarity” and “prevent[ing] their assimilation as an integral part of the White population.” Both claims were false. It was the racial hostility of White Americans that kept Japanese Americans segregated in ethnic ghettos. But the Supreme Court adopted these racist claims in upholding the mass incarceration in 1944.

A day that changed my life forever came on Jan. 4, 1982, when I sat down with Fred in his modest home in San Leandro, where he had returned after the war ended. I had called Fred to explain that my research for a book on the internment cases had uncovered Department of Justice records — untouched for the past 40 years — showing that the government’s top lawyer had lied to the court about sabotage and espionage by “disloyal” Japanese Americans. Army officials had claimed this in their final report on the internment, but FBI and Naval Intelligence records refuted it.

Justice Department lawyer Edward Ennis warned Solicitor General Charles Fahy that, “It is unfair to this racial minority that these lies, put out in an official publication, go uncorrected.” But Fahy ignored the warning and assured the justices he stood behind “every word” of the Army’s fabricated report. The court accepted this, thanking Fahy profusely.

I still vividly recall sitting nervously on Fred’s sofa as he slowly read through the documents I handed him, puffing on his pipe and petting his little dog. After about 20 minutes — which seemed like hours — Fred looked up and said, “They did me a great wrong.” He asked if I was a lawyer, which I am, then asked, “Would you be my lawyer?”

From that moment on, with the aid of more than a dozen young lawyers, most of them children or grandchildren of interment survivors, Fred pursued his quest for vindication until San Francisco-based federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled on Nov. 10, 1983, that proof of “governmental misconduct” required the vacation of Fred’s conviction. Fred’s final words at this hearing, addressed to judge Patel but equally to all Americans, bear this plea: “I thought that this decision was wrong and I still feel that way. As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing.”

Forty years after Fred’s victory, his case remains a warning so long as White Americans look suspiciously at anyone whose ancestry, no matter how many generations past, makes them “look like the enemy,” whatever group — Muslim, Chinese, Mexican — has become today’s new enemy. Fred Korematsu was not the first American, and certainly will not be the last, falsely accused of disloyalty to the country of their birth and allegiance. Eight decades later, Feb. 19 should be a day to remember and to reflect on the courage of Fred’s lifelong resistance to injustice.

One more memorable day for Fred (and for me as well) was Jan. 15, 1998, at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. I sat with Fred’s family and my fellow lawyers as President Bill Clinton placed the red sash and gold medallion of the Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck. Adding Fred to the civil rights pantheon with Homer Plessy, Rosa Parks and Linda Brown, the president gave Fred a compliment that perfectly fit him, calling him “a man of quiet bravery.” Fred’s lasting legacy was the inspiration he gave to social justice campaigns by a generation of young people who carry on his lifelong resistance to injustice. They need to learn his story, and it’s the duty of the older generation to tell it and for all of us to remember this day of American shame with the resolve never to repeat it.