EDMONTON, Alberta (AP) — A U.S.-born sociologist who refused to be sent to internment camps that kept more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans captive during World War II has died in the Canadian city of Edmonton.
Gordon Hirabayashi, who died Monday morning at the age of 93, was vindicated four decades after taking his stand when a U.S. court in 1987 concluded the nation’s internment policies had been based on political expediency, not any security risk.
Hirabayashi had by then left the U.S., eventually settling in Canada.
Hirabayashi was born in Seattle and attended the University of Washington, where he was a student when he refused to get on a bus taking Japanese-Americans to internment camps on the West Coast, saying he and his generation “were U.S. citizens. We had constitutional rights.”
