In 1942, Gordon Hirabayashi (1918-2012) refused to obey the 8 p.m. curfew for Japanese-Americans established after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After turning himself in to the FBI, Gordon was sentenced to 90 days in prison, and appealed his case all the way up to the Supreme Court, with the help of Quakers and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).
A Quaker and a pacifist, at 24 Gordon also resisted the mass removal of Japanese-Americans and refused to fill out a special questionnaire given only to Japanese-Americans that would have made him eligible for the draft.
More than 50 years later, Gordon’s brother James together with his son Lane co-authored A Principled Stand: The Story of Gordon Hirabayashi v The United States, featuring passages from Gordon’s diary and correspondence from the 1940s. Their book was published by the University of Washington Press in 2013.
Read an interview with Lane here: http://www.afsc.org/friends/fresh-voice-resistance-interview-lane-hirabayashi
