Norman Thomas

In 1942 most American liberals, and a majority of the American Civil Liberties Union's national board, accepted Roosevelt's order removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast as a wartime necessity. Thomas, the Socialist Party leader and a long-serving ACLU board member, refused. He opposed the board's decision not to challenge the order head-on and published the pamphlet Democracy and Japanese Americans that year, calling the removal a betrayal of the principles the war was meant to defend. The Supreme Court upheld the exclusion in Korematsu in 1944; Congress apologised in 1988.