S6 Ep20: The Wrong Kind of American

Crimes of the Centuries

Amber Hunt and Audioboom

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, True Crime

4.7 • 4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Twenty-two-year-old Fred Korematsu was parked on a San Francisco hillside with his girlfriend, listening to music on the car radio, when the broadcast stopped on Dec. 7, 1941. In the weeks that followed, the U.S. government imprisoned 120,000 people based solely on their ancestry. Fred, a California-born welder who had tried to register for the draft on the very first day he could, decided he wasn’t going anywhere. His decision would lead to one of the most consequential civil liberties cases in American history, and a decades-long effort to prove something that should never have needed proving.

Transcript

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0:33.6	Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society, or even
0:43.0	earn the label, Crime of the Century.
0:46.4	But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.
0:52.5	I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist, and author, and in each episode of this show,
0:57.1	I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.
1:03.9	This is Crimes of the Centuries. Fred and Ida had been dating a while.
1:20.3	Fred, just 22, had had some recent bad luck with keeping a job,
1:24.8	so their dates these days didn't consist of much. But much to the
1:29.7	consternation of Ida's parents, they were in love and making plans for being together for the
1:35.1	rest of their lives. Ida didn't hold Fred's slim wallet against him. She knew he'd been trying.
1:42.6	Fred had applied everywhere he could think of and shouldn't have had trouble getting work,
1:48.0	especially around the shipyards where his skill as a welder should have been, in theory, highly valued.
1:54.0	The Bay Area shipyards were booming in late 1941.
1:59.0	War in Europe had been driving military contracts for years, and the yards
	...

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