Defining moments from the past with lessons for a post-9/11 world…

Lessons in history. Lessons in government. Lessons in civil rights and national security and the struggle between the two in a time of war…

Michigan Government Television presents a package of curriculum materials dealing with the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, with the U.S. Supreme Court case of Korematsu v. U.S. Government, and with the dissenting opinion in that case of Michigan's Frank Murphy, a U.S. Supreme Court justice. The materials target standards and benchmarks in the Michigan Curriculum Framework in government, history, and technology. Click here to go the Defining Moments materials.

These materials tell the story of Fred Korematsu, a second generation Japanese-American or nisei , who was working as a welder in the San Francisco shipyards when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and of Frank Murphy, former Detroit mayor and Michigan governor, who was a U.S. Supreme Court justice at the same defining moment. Their lives crossed because of the involuntary internment of Japanese Americans in camps following the Pearl Harbor attack and the resulting Supreme Court case that bears Korematsu's name. Korematsu v. U.S. Government is a case that demonstrates how the dry and sometimes nearly unintelligible language of the courts, of our government at work, can translate into profound effects on the people of this country.