American Pendulum I

More Perfect

WNYC Studios

Wnyc, Scotus, Perfect, History, Court, More, Documentary, Courses, Supreme, Education, Society & Culture

4.8 • 14.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2017

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens when the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, seems to get it wrong? Korematsu v. United States is a case that’s been widely denounced and discredited, but it still remains on the books. This is the case that upheld President Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of American citizens during World War II based solely on their Japanese heritage, for the sake of national security. In this episode, we follow Fred Korematsu’s path to the Supreme Court, and we ask the question: if you can’t get justice in the Supreme Court, can you find it someplace else?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Leadership support for More Perfect is provided by the Joyce Foundation.
0:04.4	This is More Perfect, series about the Supreme Court. I'm Chad Ipum Rod.
0:09.1	In February of 2017, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said something that surprised a lot of people.
0:17.0	Well, I would say that we are not experiencing the best of times.
0:23.5	She stepped straight into the political fray and addressed this political moment.
0:27.5	I was a great man. One said that the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle.
0:38.3	It is the pendulum. And when the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it will go back.
0:48.3	Some terrible things have happened in the United States, but one can only hope that we learn
0:55.4	from those bad things.
1:00.6	Today we're going to ride the pendulum to the dark side. We're going to start with one of the
1:05.2	most infamous decisions the court has ever made, the Kormatsu decision.
1:11.3	You might imagine it's not going to be the happiest of situations, but the story that we're
1:16.0	going to tell you today and tomorrow as well actually. They're not stories of bitterness.
1:22.1	Because this curious thing happens in both cases, when our characters can't find justice inside
1:29.6	the Supreme Court, you stop looking for it there. And they find it somewhere else entirely.
1:39.2	Producer Juli Alangoria starts us off.
1:41.6	The year is 1967 and the place is San Lorenzo High School in the East Bay of California.
1:58.2	And we're in a US history classroom. I was actually a junior in high school.
2:04.8	This is Karen Kormatsu. I'm the executive director and founder of the Fred T. Kormatsu
2:09.9	Institute in San Francisco. So on this particular day, Karen is sitting at the back of the classroom.
2:15.6	And our teacher had assigned each of my classmates a little paperback book to read. You know,
2:23.1	books about American history, government, and the assignment was to then get up in front of the
	...

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