Today is Fred Korematsu Day — named after an American-born man of Japanese descent who did everything he could to avoid being placed in an internment camp in the 1940s.

What is everything? He changed his name to Clyde Sarah. And got facial surgery in an attempt to appear less Japanese. But it didn't work — he was arrested and jailed.

He challenged the incarceration and it went all the way to the Supreme Court, in U.S. v. Korematsu. He lost, but the case continues to have an impact. 

On Jan. 30, the Asian American Bar Association of New York and other organizations are marking Korematsu Day by dramatizing the courtroom transcript and highlighting the virulently xenophobic voices of those who pushed for internment. 

One of those was syndicated columnist Henry McLemore:

"I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior," wrote McLemore.  "I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either.  Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands.  Let ’em be punched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it. . . .  Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them."

Last year, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts repudiated the ruling, arguing that mass internment was "objectively unlawful."  

But Korematsu's daughter Karen pointed out an irony in an op-ed in The New York Times, noting that the Roberts' court had simultaneously upheld the Trump administration's travel ban, aimed primarily at Muslim-majority nations.

"My father spent his life fighting for justice and educating people about the inhumanity of the Japanese-American incarceration, so that we would learn from our mistakes," she wrote. "He would be upset that [his case] was cited while upholding discrimination against another marginalized group."