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WORLD WAR II: JAPANESE INCARCERATION & THE FIRST SMITH ACT TRIALS (1941–1945)
The 1941 Minneapolis trial of Socialist Workers Party and Teamsters Local 544 leaders was the first prosecution under the new Smith Act, imprisoning eighteen organizers for their politics. The next year, Executive Order 9066 forced roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans into incarceration camps — resistance that produced the Supreme Court cases of Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Minoru Yasui, and the 1944 imprisonment of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee draft resisters.