Here are some deaths that you might’ve missed hearing about in the endless 24-hour media (cough*insipid*) newsreel / bullshit pundit commentary over actual substantial reporting / entertainment between commercial filler that’s become news in the US.

Fred Korematsu

from suicide girls news (which is actually a great source for diverse news topics..no, really)

In 1942, when the United States military forced all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to live in internment camps, one man fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. And lost. That man, Fred Korematsu died this week at the age of 86..

Considering all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to be a national security threat in the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing, the United States government ordered all of them (including U.S. citizens) to move out of their homes and into internment camps. One man, Fred Koremasu, a 23-year-old American citizen and son of Japanese immigrants, refused to move out the home he shared with his girlfriend. As a result, he was arrested and convicted of defying military orders. In one of the darkest moments in American legal history, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction in 1944. Showing extreme deference to the military judgment, the Court stated:

…we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term implies…To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue. Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily…

Basically, the threat that any Japanese-American could be a spy justified forcing them to be removed from their homes and placed in what were essentially prison camps. There was no individual evaluation of loyalty or investigation of sabotage. Simply because of heritage, 110,000 men, women, and children were interned for 2 years during World War II.

Mr. Korematsu’s conviction was finally overturned in the early 1980s (he had not been imprisoned for that time, but his conviction had officially stayed on the record). In 1998, President Clinton honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, hailing him as a civil rights hero.

Mr. Korematsu admitted that he wasn’t interested in fighting for civil rights when he challenged his arrest, but just wanted to live his life.

Korematsu and his sweetheart decided to move to Nevada. He assumed a new identity as Clyde Sarah, a Spanish Hawaiian, and at the suggestion of his girlfriend, who saw a doctor’s ad, even had plastic surgery on his eyes.

For 40 years, Mr. Korematsu didn’t talk about his fight and place in America’s embarrassing history. His own daughter learned about his case in a history text book. In recent years, though, he had begun to speak out for civil rights, denouncing the Patriot Act and the treatment of Arab-Americans as parallel to the way the Japanese-Americans had been treated during World War II.

He was a rather unlikely hero, but Mr. Korematsu’s name will forever be associated with a fight against a gross violation of human rights.

Saul Bellow

The Pulitzer and Nobel prize winning author died at the age of 89. According to the Nobel Foundation, Bellow won the National Book award for his novel The Adventures of Augie March. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt’s Gift.

Bellow was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after World War II, among them Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. To American letters, he brought the immigrant’s hustle, the bookworm’s brains and the high-minded notions of the born romantic.

“The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists — William Faulkner and Saul Bellow,” Philip Roth said in a statement Tuesday. “Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century.”

He was the first writer to win the National Book Award three times: in 1954 for The Adventures of Augie March in 1965 for Herzog and in 1971 for “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” In 1976, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt’s Gift. That same year Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, cited for his “human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture.” In 2003, the Library of America paid the rare tribute of releasing work by a living writer, issuing a volume of Bellow’s early novels.

His fifth wife gave birth to their daughter December of 1999. He will have a private funeral.

Just thought I’d fill in since the blog of death is on hiatus. I have that old Jim Carroll song stuck in my head now.