The farm worker movement celebrates Tuesday, January 30, as Fred Korematsu Day, honoring his struggle for the civil rights of Japanese Americans. In 1942, after the attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii during World War II, all Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps Fred Korematsu bravely refused to be interned and, like Cesar Chavez, Korematsu fought against racism and inequality against his people, a battle he won decades later in federal court.
This Fred Korematsu Day also honors other Asian American heroes, including the Filipino American farm workers led by Larry Itliong who began the Delano Grape Strike in September 1965, and then asked Cesar Chavez’s mostly Latino union to join their picket lines. The grape strike and boycott organized by the joint Filipino-Latino union struggle lasted five years and established the merged organization, the United Farm Workers, as the first enduring farm workers union in U.S history.