Ines Trinh scanned her class of 29 fifth-graders in San Lorenzo on Friday and took a deep breath. It was time to make the lesson personal.

"Just imagine, you're told to leave your home, you've got to pack up and you have only two suitcases for everything," Trinh told them. The Lorenzo Manor Elementary schoolkids' eyes widened. "I want you to think about it. How would you feel?"

Ten hands shot up. "Mad," said the first boy. "Sad," said a girl. "Insulted ... guilty ... lonely ... disgusted," intoned others.

Trinh smiled. Sixty-nine years after U.S. soldiers herded 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II, she was able in one moment to make her young charges gain a new understanding of racial discrimination in America - and it was all really thanks to one man.

That man is Fred Korematsu.

Sunday is his day in California, the first in U.S. history to be officially named after an Asian American, and more than 500 teachers like Trinh are using it to tell elementary and high school students about his life and its landmark place in the annals of civil rights.

Refused internment

Korematsu was arrested near his San Leandro home in 1942 for refusing to go to a camp with the rest of his family. A 22-year-old welder at the time, he endured squalid prison cells and transfers to different camps until the end of the war.

He lost his legal challenge to his confinement before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944, but he never gave up on righting the wrong done to him - even as the decades ground on and he found it hard to make a living as a welder and draftsman with a "disloyalty" conviction on his record.

That all changed in 1983 when Korematsu finally won exoneration. A federal judge in San Francisco overturned his conviction for resisting internment, and that victory paved the way for an official apology in 1988 from the U.S. government to internees and checks of $20,000 to each camp survivor.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Korematsu.

Korematsu died in 2005. Four months ago, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an order designating every Jan. 30 in California as Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.

Sunday's inauguration of the day will be celebrated at UC Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium with presentations by the honoree's daughter, Karen Korematsu, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and others.

Those who carry on his legacy, however, are most excited about the classroom teachings that will take place in the coming weeks. Some classes, such as Trinh's, began the lessons Friday.

'A historic event'

"This is a historic event," said Ling Woo Liu, director of the Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education, which was founded in San Francisco in 2009 and created the curriculum for the classes. "Fred Korematsu's story is about right and wrong, fair and unfair, and we think it's very important to show to kids - not just for what happened before, but to keep in mind today.

"We may not have internment camps like we did then, but we still have a lot of racial and religious discrimination," Liu said. "Just look at some of the ways Muslim Americans have been treated since 9/11."

Most of the children in Ines Trinh's fifth-grade class had never heard of Korematsu. After Friday, they said, they will never forget him.

"It was really surprising to me to see how he stood up for his race and he tried to make things right," said Isabel Ayala, 11. "Now I feel like he's very important. In some ways he was treated even worse than Martin Luther King because he was taken to jail just because of his race."

Learning from history

Words like that are balm to the ears of 60-year-old Karen Korematsu, who co-founded the institute in her father's name and has devoted years to furthering his legacy.

"People don't pay enough attention to history," she said. "They learn something and don't remember it, so they wind up making the same kinds of mistakes. That's why it's important to teach the lesson of my father at an early age."

Korematsu's niece

One building over from Trinh's classroom, another teacher was giving her class a preview of the Korematsu Day lesson she will deliver Monday. But it wasn't until halfway through her presentation that she let them know they're getting a little something extra with their lecture.

"Fred Korematsu is my uncle," third-grade teacher Joanne Kataoka, 62, told her class, saying it almost shyly - a characteristic often mentioned about Korematsu himself. "We'll be talking about how he is a local hero."

"Wow!" a half dozen children erupted at once. "You must be a hero, too!"

Kataoka blushed.

"It's not about me," she said quietly. "It's about standing up for what is right."

Honoring Korematsu

The state's main Fred Korematsu Day celebration will take place from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday at Wheeler Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus. The program includes presentations by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and a screening of the Emmy Award-winning film "Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story." Tickets range from $5 to $100. For information, go to fredkorematsuday.org.