Frank Chuman, a lawyer whose experience in a World War II internment camp in California motivated a decades-long career fighting for equal rights for Japanese Americans, died on May 23, 2022, in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 105.
His daughter, Diana Heyd, confirmed the death, saying it went unreported at the time because it had been decades since Mr. Chuman had practiced law, and that he had been living in Thailand until just before he died.
A son of Japanese immigrants, Mr. Chuman grew up in a racially integrated section of Los Angeles, where he said he faced little discrimination. He said the same about his time as an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, and after beginning law school at the University of Southern California.
That changed in December 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Three months later, he and his family were ordered to relocate to Manzanar, an isolated internment camp on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California.
He was released in 1943 to resume his legal studies, and graduated from the University of Maryland law school in 1945.
Still, the experience was a searing one. After he returned to Los Angeles, he became a leading figure in fighting discriminatory laws and practices, beginning with an attempt to deport thousands of Japanese noncitizen residents.
“I was running all over the western states, including almost all the cities in California, in connection with immigration cases, going into Oregon, Idaho, Salt Lake City,” Mr. Chuman said in a 1975 oral history for California State University, Fullerton.
He persuaded courts to strike down restrictive covenant laws in the Los Angeles area that allowed communities to bar nonwhite people from moving in.
He helped write the initial briefs for several cases that went to the United States Supreme Court, including Oyama v. California (1948), involving a law preventing Japanese residents from owning land, and Takahashi v. Fish and Game Commission (1948), involving a law that barred Japanese residents from obtaining fishing and hunting licenses.
The court invalidated both laws.
“He was a constant presence in the Japanese American community, in Los Angeles in particular, through this time period,” said Brian Niiya, the content director at Densho, an online archive of Japanese American history.
Mr. Chuman’s abiding cause remained the legality of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, which ordered some 120,000 Japanese residents and Japanese Americans into 10 internment camps during World War II.
At law school, Mr. Chuman had learned about the common-law doctrine of error coram nobis, in which a ruling can be vacated if the government is found to have committed material misconduct, like withholding evidence.
He was sure that the government had lied during several unsuccessful test cases against the executive order. But he could not find plaintiffs willing to file a suit.
Mr. Chuman revisited the idea in testimony in 1980 before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which concluded that the policy was a result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
Two years later, the lawyers Peter Irons and Dale Minami used the coram nobis doctrine to reopen several internment cases, including that of Fred Korematsu, who had been imprisoned after refusing to relocate to a camp.
In 1983, a federal judge in California, Marilyn Hall Patel, vacated the convictions of Mr. Korematsu and others.
Mr. Chuman also built bridges between the fight for Japanese American rights and those of other people of color, in particular Black Americans. As the legal counsel and later president of the Japanese American Citizens League, he filed amicus briefs in cases brought by the N.A.A.C.P. The league was also a member of the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights (now the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights), an umbrella organization at the forefront of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
“It’s no use talking about freedom from discrimination to others unless we have it right here at home,” he told a civil rights conference in Boise, Idaho, in 1962.
Frank Fujio Chuman was born on April 29, 1917, in Santa Barbara, Calif. His father, Hitsuji (he also went by Henry), was a gardener who moved his family to Los Angeles in pursuit of better work when Frank was 3, and eventually owned a dry-cleaning business with Frank’s mother, Kiyo (Yamamoto) Chuman.
A standout high school student, Frank studied political science at U.C.L.A., with the hopes of joining the Foreign Service.
Though he experienced little overt discrimination, he was well aware that it existed. He was told not to bother trying to join a fraternity, and a professor advised him that as a person of Japanese descent, Mr. Chuman would never be accepted into the diplomatic corps.
He graduated in 1938 and began law school at U.S.C. in 1940, working full time as a clerk for the Los Angeles County Probation Department to cover his expenses.
Following Pearl Harbor, government offices were instructed to fire all Japanese American employees. Mr. Chuman’s manager refused and instead gave him a leave of absence.
At the Manzanar camp, Mr. Chuman witnessed a riot in which military police opened fire on a crowd of internees; two were killed and nine injured.
During the ensuing investigation, the government pressured staff members at the camp’s hospital to testify that the victims had been shot head on, as if they had been attacking, when in fact they had been shot from the side or behind. Most of the hospital workers refused, but the case was nevertheless closed without charges.
Mr. Chuman was allowed to leave Manzanar in 1943 to continue law school, first at the University of Toledo in Ohio, and then at the University of Maryland.
Along with his daughter, Mr. Chuman’s survivors include his wife, Donna. He and his wife moved to Thailand, her place of birth, in 2004.
Following his presidency of the Japanese American Citizens League, Mr. Chuman spent several years writing “The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese Americans” (1976), the first comprehensive legal history of the Japanese community in the United States.
He also wrote a memoir, “Manzanar and Beyond: Memoirs of Frank F. Chuman, Nisei Attorney” (2011).
Mr. Chuman liked to compare Japanese Americans to bamboo: quietly resilient, bending but not breaking under pressure.
“You must be like the bamboo,” he wrote in his memoir. “You must not permit yourself to break under the buffeting you will face in your life.”
