Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts (center), future U.S. president, is pictured with members of the Japanese American Democratic Club on Sept. 19, 1956, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. Pictured with him are (from left) Frank Chuman, Frank Kurihara, Meri-Jane Yokoe and James Mitsumori. Kennedy was campaigning for Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver, the Democratic nominees for president and vice president. They lost to the Republican incumbent, Dwight Eisenhower.
Frank Fumio Chuman, a pioneering Nisei attorney who was active in many of the key civil rights-related cases in the early postwar era, died on May 22, 2022 in Bangkok. He was 105.
His passing became public knowledge only recently. His daughter, Diana Heyd, told The New York Times that it went unreported at the time because it had been decades since Chuman had practiced law and he had been living in Thailand for many years.
Born in 1917 in Montecito, he was the son of immigrants from Kagoshima. His father managed a local estate and his mother was a “picture bride.” The family moved to Los Angeles, where the elder Chuman worked as a gardener and dry cleaner.
Frank Chuman became an Eagle Scout and graduated in 1934 from Los Angeles High School, where he was on the debating squad and served as class valedictorian. He graduated in 1938 from UCLA, where he served in ROTC.
He considered applying to the Foreign Service, but the dean of UCLA’s Political Science Department dissuaded him, saying that the State Department would not hire someone of his ethnicity.
In his memoirs, Chuman described a Depression-era climate in which racism was rampant. Nisei Caltech graduates could not get engineering jobs and law firms would not hire Nisei attorneys. He found work in a market on West Beverly Boulevard lugging crates of produce.
He wrote, “One day one of my co-workers in the produce department who was born in Japan approached me and in a sarcastic tone sneered, ‘I heard you graduated UCLA and that you are saving up money for more education. Forget about this foolish dream. … All the good jobs are for white people, not for people like us who are Japanese.’ I remained silent, knowing that what he was saying was true.”
Chuman was hired as a messenger by Los Angeles County in the fall of 1938. He carried files around county departments and courts, where he found exchanges between lawyers and judges fascinating. He enrolled at USC as a law student in September 1940 and worked at the L.A. County Probation Department.
When Executive Order 9066 was issued, Chuman was confined at Manzanar. In March 1942, he was appointed chief administrator at the Manzanar Hospital, where he served for a year. Following the Manzanar Riot in December 1942, he supervised the care of inmates shot by military police.
He initially answered “no-no” to the government loyalty questionnaire out of resentment over his confinement, but through the efforts of Ralph Merritt, Manzanar’s camp director, was he able to withdraw those answers and be approved for a leave permit.
Through sponsorship of the American Friends Service Committee, Chuman left Manzanar in the fall of 1943 to continue his legal studies, first at the University of Toledo in Ohio, then in Baltimore at the University of Maryland Law School, where he learned about the ancient common law known as writ of error coram nobis. He graduated in 1945 and returned to Los Angeles.
Chuman was hired by civil rights lawyer A.L. Wirin as a law clerk for his law firm, which served as special counsel to the JACL. In the process, Chuman helped draft the briefs for several landmark constitutional cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, notably Oyama v. California and Takahashi v. California Fish & Game Commission.
In 1946, Chuman won a legal challenge to racial restrictive covenants in South Pasadena, which maintained restrictions against minorities on publicly owned land.
After passing the California bar in 1947, Chuman joined John Aiso in a law partnership, which remained active until Aiso became a judge in 1954. He then practiced with David McKibbin until 1968.
In 1946 he became president of the JACL’s newly reopened Los Angeles chapter. He was legal counsel for the National JACL from 1953-60 and served as its national president from 1960-62. During his term as president, Chuman negotiated with UCLA the creation of the Japanese American Research Project (JARP), to be housed at the university, with archives holding materials on Japanese immigrants. He helped raise $220,000 to fund it.
In connection with JARP, Chuman devoted several years of research to the creation of a legal history of Japanese Americans, including the evolution of legislation and jurisprudence in regard to immigration restrictions, alien land laws, wartime confinement and other subjects. This resulted in his book, “The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese Americans,” published in 1976.
Chuman formed part of the JACL committee that was assigned in summer 1963 to draft a statement on civil rights. He was named a member of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission and organized intergroup meetings to avoid racial violence.
In the 1970s, Chuman was active in developing the Japanese American redress campaign. He wanted to use the writ of error coram nobis to reopen the wartime Supreme Court cases of Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, in which the court supported the incarceration of Japanese Americans.
In 1981, during testimony before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), Chuman proposed using the writ to attack the convictions. Soon after, lawyer/scholar Peter Irons and attorney Dale Minami independently undertook a coram nobis petition, based on newly discovered proof of official misconduct — the concealment of evidence that Japanese Americans were not a security threat. Chuman joined the legal team as an adviser.
The coram nobis petition ultimately led to the reversal by federal court judges of the convictions of all three men, but one judge refused to address the issue of government misconduct in Yasui’s case.
In the early 1990s, Chuman worked at The Rafu Shimpo. His titles included acting editor-in-chief and advisor to the Japanese section.
In 2005 he received a Distinguished Graduate Award from University of Maryland School of Law. In 2011 he published “Manzanar and Beyond: Memoir of Frank F. Chuman, Nisei Attorney,” when he was 94.
In 2012, living Nisei students of USC whose education was interrupted by the mass incarceration were granted honorary degrees, but by then Chuman had moved to Thailand with his wife, Donna, sometime after 2000. In 2021, USC President Carol Folt allowed honorary degrees to be granted to all Nisei students. Grace Shiba, executive director of the USC Asian Pacific Alumni Association, was able to contact Chuman and have an honorary degree sent to him.
In a video message, Folt said, “On behalf of our university, I am so sorry you were never allowed to complete your law degree at our institution. Eighty years after this grave injustice, I hope you will accept the diploma as our way of thanking you for your distinguished career in law and your everlasting contributions to the Japanese American redress efforts.”
She added, “Your activism in civil rights and involvement in the landmark constitutional cases argued before the Supreme Court show what is just and right about the United States. You’re a shining example that our students of today will aspire to follow.”
Sources: Densho Encyclopedia, USC News