page_title: Gordon Hirabayashi
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Gordon Hirabayashi / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Gordon Hirabayashi's draft registration card, shown at Courage in Action: the Life and Legacy of Gordon K. Hirabayashi, a symposium on the occasion of the presentation of Gordon K. Hirabayashi's Medal of Freedom to the the University of Washington Library Special Collections, which holds the Gordon Hirabayshi Papers, February 22, 2014. Note that this is a distinct document from the one depicted at File:Copy of Gordon Hirabayashi's draft registration card.jpg
context_page_description: Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi was an American sociologist, best known for his principled resistance to the Japanese American internment during World War II, and the court case which bears his name, Hirabayashi v. United States.
context_section_description: Hirabayashi was born in Seattle to a Christian family who were associated with the Mukyōkai Christian Movement. He graduated from Auburn Senior High School in Auburn, Washington, and in 1937 went to the University of Washington, where he received his degree. At the University he participated in the YMCA and became a religious pacifist.
  Although he at first considered accepting internment, he ultimately became one of three to openly defy it. He joined the Quaker-run American Friends Service Committee. In 1942 he turned himself in to the FBI, and after being convicted for curfew violation was sentenced to 90 days in prison. He invited prosecution in part to appeal the verdict all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court with the backing of the ACLU. One of his lawyers was the Philadelphia Quaker attorney Harold Evans. The Supreme Court, however, unanimously ruled against him in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), albeit with three Justices filing separate opinions that concurred with the Court's decision only with certain reservations.
  Given wartime exigencies, officials would not transport him to prison or even pay his train fare, so he hitchhiked to the prison in Arizona where he had been ordered to serve his sentence. Once there, wardens stated they lacked the sufficient papers as he was two weeks late. They considered letting him just go home, but he feared this would look suspicious. After that they made the suggestion he could go out for dinner and a movie, which would give them time to find his papers. He agreed to this and, by the time he finished doing so, they had found the relevant paperwork.
  Hirabayashi later spent a year in federal prison at McNeil Island Penitentiary for refusing induction into the armed forces, contending that a questionnaire sent to Japanese Americans demanding renunciation of allegiance to the emperor of Japan was racially discriminatory because other ethnic groups were not asked about adherence to foreign leaders.
caption: Gordon Hirabayashi's draft registration card. Written in the left-hand margin: "I am a conscientious objector."
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