Mitsuye Endo

Quick Facts

Significance:

Supreme Court Plaintiff

Place of Birth:

Sacramento, California

Date of Birth:

May 10, 1920

Place of Death:

Chicago, Illinois

Date of Death:

April 14, 2006

"They said it's for the good of everybody, and so I said, well if that's it, I'll go ahead and do it."

Mitsuye Endo was born in Sacramento, California in 1920. She and her three siblings grew up like many other Nisei children (first generation Japanese American citizens). She attended public school, secretarial school, and then took a clerical job with the California state government.

The attack on Pearl Harbor sent their lives into sudden chaos. The California government fired Endo and approximately 400 other employees, simply because of their Japanese ancestry. Endo joined the legal challenge against their firings. Their legal battle, backed by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was one of several filed by protesting Japanese Americans. However, Endo's case was upended when Japanese Americans were "evacuated" from the west coast that spring. 

Endo and her family were sent first to Sacramento Assembly Center and then Tule Lake Relocation Center. Soon, she received an unusual proposal from lawyer James Purcell: Would she sue the United States government?

Though hesitant, Endo agreed to file a habeas corpus petition. The government could not imprison Japanese Americans without trial, they argued. Purcell filed the petition on July 12, 1942, in federal district court in San Francisco.

While her legal battle began, Endo remained in Tule Lake Relocation Center. Her friends, like many young adult Nisei, applied to "relocate" to the midwest or east coast. Sometimes Endo longed to join them. She could fit into the mainstream American social scene wherever she went. In fact, that's partially why she had joined the legal case. The legal team believed that Endo would be accepted by even the most suspicious American judge: She was a government employee, Christian, knew only English, had never visited Japan, and had a brother in the army. But relocating could derail her case, and so Endo remained at Tule Lake.

A year later, Endo signed the so-called "loyalty questionnaire." She moved to Topaz Relocation Center in Arizona. There, Endo and Purcell continued to appeal their case, pushing it through delays to the Supreme Court. The WRA eventually offered Endo an immediate leave permit, if she would abandon her case. Endo refused, choosing to remain imprisoned so that she could represent her fellow Japanese Americans. 

The Supreme Court issued its final ruling on December 18, 1944. "Loyal" Japanese Americans could not be imprisoned without cause.

"We are of the view that Mitsuye Endo should be given her liberty. In reaching that conclusion we do not come to the underlying constitutional issues which have been argued. For we conclude that, whatever power the War Relocation Authority may have to detail other classes of citizens, it has no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure." 
- Justice William O. Douglas

The decision, however, did not declare the exclusion or mass incarceration unconstitutional. On the same day, the Supreme Court ruled against Fred Korematsu in Korematsu v. The United States. They determined that Korematsu had been lawfully arrested for violating the exclusion order. Korematsu protested for decades longer, until his conviction was overturned by a writ of error coram nobis in 1984.

Two weeks after the Supreme Court's Endo decision, President Roosevelt officially ended west coast exclusion. Mitsuye Endo could finally go home.

After the War

In May 1945, Endo moved to Chicago, Illinois, where her sister and brother-in-law had relocated. She became a secretary for the Mayor's Committee on Race Relations, married Kenneth Tsutsumi, and had three children. She rarely spoke about her legal suit, even to her own family.

Though Endo, now Tsutsumi, never returned to California, her resilience and courage helped thousands of people leave the incarceration camps and return home.