By Lookout Staff

January 20, 2015-- A day after the nation celebrated civil right's leader Dr. Martin Luther King, the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District Board of Education will vote Tuesday on a resolution honoring a relatively little-known Asian American civil rights leader whose state holiday is later this month.

During its regular meeting, which begins at 5:30 p.m. at the district's headquarters, 1651 16^th Street, in Santa Monica, the six-member board will vote on a resolution acknowledging Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution, a state holiday declared in 2010 by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Public schools are encouraged to “conduct exercises remembering the life of Fred Korematsu,” who was imprisoned by the U.S. government for refusing to be incarcerated in an internment camp during World War II, according to the bill, AB 1775, that spawned the observance.

Falling on Korematsu's birthday, Jan. 30, the state holiday highlights the humble master welder's lifelong crusade against the U.S. government's incarceration of more than 100,000 citizen and permanent residents of Japanese ancestry during World War II, the bill said.

His story has some similarities to King's.

Like King but several years earlier, Korematsu was arrested for refusing to be segregated. Rather than report to the assembly center with the rest of his family, Korematsu, then 23, chose to defy the order.

On May 30, 1942, he was arrested and charged with violating the “military exclusion order” and spent the remainder of the war in jail and at the Topaz concentration camp in Utah.

After the war, Korematsu did not end his fight, appealing his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1944 upheld his conviction. It took nearly 40 more years for Korematsu to finally receive justice. It came in 1983 when the courts finally overturned his conviction, setting a precedent for similar cases, according to the bill's text.

“It was a pivotal moment in civil rights history,” according to the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, a nonprofit organization that works to keep his story alive “as a concrete reference in linking the story of Japanese American” interned in WWII, the institute's website says.

Korematsu's legal arguments also influenced Congress' passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which “recognized the grave injustice that was done to United States residents and citizens of Japanese ancestry by the forced relocation and incarceration of civilians during World War II,” according the bill.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998 and has several schools and educational institutions across California named in his honor, as well as two streets in San Jose.

Korematsu died in 2005 at age 85, “leaving behind a lasting influence on the importance of maintaining the constitutionally mandated guarantee of liberty for all Americans,” according to AB 1775.