In 1941 after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government rounded up and incarcerated Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. While World War II raged overseas, four American citizens individually challenged the constitutionality of the Japanese American incarceration. But the only person to win her Supreme Court case is the lone member without a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi is also the only woman of the four challengers to be excluded from the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Her posthumous nomination for the Presidential Medal of Freedom received a swell of support from community leaders who formed a nomination committee, wrote letters of support, and circulated a petition calling for Endo Tsutsumi to be honored.
On May 3, President Joe Biden presented 19 of the awards at a White House ceremony — Endo Tsutsumi was not among the honorees.
Wayne Tsutsumi felt disappointed by the news, but he holds out hope that his mother will get another opportunity to be honored at a future ceremony.
“Being nominated is an honor she deserves,” said Tsutsumi, 75. He thinks it would have been great to have his mom recognized during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Legal scholars credit Endo Tsutsumi’s landmark 1944 Supreme Court case with forcing the U.S. government to close the camps and release Japanese Americans from incarceration. Her case along with the legal challenges brought by Gordon Hirabayashi, Min Yasui and Fred Korematsu helped pave the road to the U.S. government’s apology and monetary compensation in 1988. Of the four legal cases, Endo Tsutsumi’s was the only successful one. But her legacy is lesser known.
“I think that’s acknowledged,” said Kathryn Bannai, 73, a member of Endo Tsutsumi’s Presidential Medal of Freedom committee, about her relative anonymity. “I think that it relates in two parts: the fact that she’s a woman [and] I think it relates in part to the fact that her case hasn’t…
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