Today at the White House, President Obama will present a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to 17 individuals or their families. The list comprises Shirley Chisholm, Itzhak Perlman, Stephen Sondheim, Barbara Mikulski, Barbra Streisand, Lee Hamilton, Gloria Estefan, Emilio Estefan, Willie Mays, James Taylor, Yogi Berra, Katherine G. Johnson, Bonnie Carroll, Steven Spielberg, Billy Frank, Jr., William Ruckelshaus and Minoru Yasui.
The medal is given “to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant or private endeavors.”
Two of the 17—Yasui and Frank—are being honored because they resisted injustice. Families of the two, along with Berra’s and Chisholm’s, will receive their medals posthumously. Yasui died in 1986. Frank, who you can read about here, died in 2014.
Yasui’s youngest daughter, Holly Yasui, who now lives in Mexico, will be at the ceremony to accept her father’s medal for the family. She is making a documentary film—Never Give Up! Minoru Yasui and the Fight for Justice—about her father’s life. There is a Yasui tribute page here.
Born in Oregon in 1916 to Japanese immigrant parents, writes Mark Baker, Yasui took his bachelor’s degree at the University of Oregon in 1937 and was the first Japanese American, in 1939, to graduate from the UO School of Law. In March 1942, with the United States at war, Japanese Americans and non-citizen Japanese were placed under curfew. As a consequence of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 and Public Law 503, they were not allowed to leave their homes from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. or go outside a five-mile radius of their homes during the day. The executive order also paved the way for relocating and interning of people of Japanese ancestry, citizens or not.
The 25-year-old Yasui felt the curfew was unconstitutional because it specified a racial group, and he spent several hours on the streets of Portland the night of March 28 trying to get an officer to arrest him so he could test the law. When none did, he turned himself in and wound up serving two nights in jail before being released. He spent that summer with 3,000 other Japanese Americans in what had been a livestock pavilion until they were all shipped off to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in southern Idaho.
In November he was returned for trial. A district judge ruled the curfew violation unconstitutional, but also ruled that Yasui had given up his U.S. citizenship because he had worked for the Japanese Consulate in Portland. He was fined $5,000 ($73,000 in 2015 dollars) and sentenced to a year in jail.
Baker cites Lauren Kessler’s 1993 book about Yasui, titled Stubborn Twig:
“For the next month and a half, Min was kept in the cell 24 hours a day, with no exercise periods and no trips to the showers or the barber. He tried to wash himself in the washbasin with rags, but after six weeks of this, he was ‘stinking dirty.’
“His hair grew shaggy, unkempt and tangled. His nails grew so long that they curled inward.”
He spent nine months in solitary confinement.
In 1943, an appeals court overturned both parts of the lower court’s decision, ruling that the curfew was constitutional for reasons of “wartime necessity.” But the judge also ruled that Yasui had not given up his citizenship by working at the Japanese consulate.
Meanwhile, as with 110,000 other people of Japanese ancestry on the mainland, Yasui’s father was sent to one of the many internment camps, which many scholars say should be called concentration camps. His was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since he was not a citizen like most of the internees, he was held as an enemy alien. His property, like that of most other people of Japanese ancestry, was confiscated.
In Hawaii, which had actually been attacked, 1,800 of the 157,000 people of Japanese ancestry were interned. That wasn’t because Roosevelt didn’t want to incarcerate them. He wanted them all moved to Molokai, a former leper colony. But that presented logistical problems. It also would have meant major economic dislocations since people of Japanese ancestry made up a third of the population and the backbone of the Hawaiian labor force.
After the war, Yasui moved to Colorado. There he became executive director of the Denver Commission on Community Relations “where he established and oversaw hundreds of programs for ethnic and religious minorities, youth, seniors and low-income people,” his daughter told Baker. He became chairman of the Japanese American Citizens League’s National Committee for Redress, which, beginning in the 1970s, sought a public apology for the way Japanese Americans had been treated.
The Supreme Court had ruled in 1944—in Korematsu v. United States—that wartime internment of people of Japanese descent was constitutional. But in 1980, the original inflammatory report of the evacuation and internment was found in the federal archives. It showed that the rationale for the relocation and incarceration was based on lies and that few people of Japanese ancestry living on U.S. territory represented a security threat.
Subsequently, the courts overturned the cases of the only other two Japanese Americans who had challenged the constitutionality of the relocation and incarceration—Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi. Yasui’s case was ruled moot by the Ninth Circuit in 1986 because he died that year and the Supreme Court later upheld the lower court’s ruling.
In 1988, the Civil Liberties Act included a formal apology to ethnic Japanese incarcerated in the camps and opened the way to compensation to the surviving internees. By a vote of 243 to 141 in the House and 69 to 27 in the Senate, Congress approved a $20,000 tax-free payment to each of the internees still living. Ultimately, 82,219 received compensation. But by the time the payments began in 1990, Yasui had been dead for three years and his heirs were ineligible for payments.