Gordon Hirabayashi

In the months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a presidential order allowed the U.S. military to force 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast into inland internment camps. Gordon Hirabayashi, who died Jan. 2 at 93, refused to register, was convicted of violating the order and served 90 days in prison. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment. "Our Constitution was reduced to a scrap of paper," Hirabayashi said in 1985, after appealing his case a second time. Two years later, a federal court overturned his conviction, and in 1988, the government apologized and paid $1.2 billion in reparations to the affected citizens. Hirabayashi, who became a prominent sociologist, later concluded: "It wasn't necessarily the Constitution that failed me. It was the people who were placed in the responsibility of upholding the Constitution."