Frank Chuman (Credit: Pacific Citizen Digital Photo Archive)
Frank Chuman, a lawyer and longtime advocate for Japanese American civil rights who was incarcerated during World War II and later helped overturn landmark wartime convictions, has died.
His daughter, Diana Chuman Heyd, confirmed the death which occurred on May 23, 2022, at his home in Bangkok. He was 105. She did not cite a cause.
Chuman was a second-year law student at the University of Southern California in 1942 when he and his family were ordered to the Manzanar detention camp following President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066. He later said the incarceration shaped his career in law and civil rights.
After his release in 1943, Chuman completed his law degree at the University of Maryland in 1945 and returned to Los Angeles to work with the Japanese American Citizens League. He helped prepare briefs in two 1948 U.S. Supreme Court cases, Oyama v. California and Takahashi v. Fish & Game Commission, which struck down state laws restricting the rights of Japanese and other Asian immigrants.
Chuman remained focused on redressing wartime injustices. He proposed using the little-used writ of error coram nobis to challenge the convictions of Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, who had been prosecuted for violating wartime exclusion orders. The strategy was taken up by attorneys including Peter Irons and Dale Minami, and federal judges overturned the convictions between 1983 and 1984.
He helped establish the Japanese American Research Project at UCLA and later advocated for federal reparations, which were approved under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
Chuman recounted his life in a 2011 memoir, “Manzanar and Beyond,” recalling his mother’s advice to be like bamboo—flexible in hardship but unbroken.
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