The Minoru Yasui Tribute Committee and the Oregon Nikkei Endowment present the Minoru Yasui Day March for Justice, scheduled to take place on March 28 from 4-6 p.m. This event is being held in celebration of the historic bill passed by the Oregon Senate and House in 2016 designating March 28 of each year as Minoru Yasui Day.
The public is invited to honor Minoru “Min” Yasui, a civil rights champion, the first-ever Oregonian awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom (2015), the highest civilian award in the country, by President Barack Obama.
In honor of Min Yasui Day, a walk starting at 4 p.m. is planned from the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center (121 N.W. Second Ave.) to Portland Center Stage at The Armory, (128 NW 11th Ave.) for a 5 p.m. screening of “Never Give Up! Minoru Yasui and the Fight for Justice,” a documentary produced by Min’s daughter, Holly, and for recognition of the 2018 winners of the Minoru Yasui Essay Contest. A Q-and-A with Holly Yasui and Peggy Nagae, Minoru Yasui’s lead attorney, will follow.
Minoru (Min) Yasui was born in Hood River in 1916. He graduated from the University of Oregon School of Law and was the first Japanese American to practice law in the state of Oregon. On March 28, 1942, in Portland, Min Yasui deliberately violated a military curfew imposed upon all persons of Japanese ancestry under Executive Order 9066. This order led to the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. He challenged the discriminatory curfew in order to initiate a test case in court.
He spent nine months in solitary confinement at the Multnomah County Jail as he appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was released from jail in 1943, only to be sent to the Minidoka American internment camp in Idaho.
After the war, Yasui moved to Denver and continued to defend the human and civil rights not only of Japanese Americans, but for ethnic and religious minorities, children and youth, the aged, low income people, etc. As executive director of the Denver Commission on Community Relations, he helped to initiate and oversaw a plethora of programs and organizations serving diverse communities. In the 1970s and ‘80s, he spearheaded the redress movement to win reparations and a formal apology from the government for the injustices against Japanese Americans during World War II.
In 1983, he returned to Portland to reopen his wartime case in the U.S. District Court of Oregon. While his conviction was vacated, the court denied his request for an evidentiary hearing, which he appealed. His case was in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals when he died in 1986.
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