Biography
Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi was a Japanese American student at the University of Washington and a Quaker who, in 1942, openly defied the wartime curfew and exclusion orders imposed on people of Japanese ancestry, turning himself in to the FBI. Convicted of curfew violation and of refusing to report for removal, he was sentenced to ninety days, which he asked to serve at an outdoor road camp — hitchhiking to Arizona to do so. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943); he was later imprisoned again for refusing the loyalty questionnaire and the draft. His convictions were finally vacated in 1987 through a writ of coram nobis.
