Yasui Day: Extend the honor to a brave advocate

To honor Yasui this way is fitting for the Hood River native who devoted his life to the concept of “justice for all.” A contingent of family and friends visited Salem last week to urge approval of House Bill 4009. It extends what has been the caring, and carefully documented, series of actions by Hood River residents in the past year to confer on Yasui the honor he so richly deserves. Students at Hood River Middle School wrote letters and compiled a video for President Barack Obama, and the president in November 2015 awarded Yasui the Presidential Medal of Freedom for devoting his life “to fighting for basic human rights and the fair and equal treatment of every American.”

That award is the highest in the land, and a designated day in Oregon is rare: last year the Legislature designated March 22 as Gov. Tom McCall Day, putting Yasui in esteemed company. Calls to the State Archives and office of the Senate suggest that no other such honoraria are on record. McCall, 1913-83, and Yasui, 1916-1986, were contemporaries who both studied at University of Oregon in the late 1930s.

(Oregon Blue Book would be the perfect place to list “in perpetuity” days, and similar such honors, so that Oregonians have both a record and the means to annually observe the occasion, which is the point of making these kind of official designations.)

Why March 28 to honor Yasui? That’s the day in the dark year of 1942 that Yasui, the first Japanese American graduate of the University of Oregon School of Law and the first Japanese American member of the State Bar, violated a military curfew imposed under Executive Order 9066 — the order that led to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

How many people stand up so bravely to the federal government, and at such a young age (26), and then dedicate their lives to acting on behalf of others suffering discrimination?

Yasui lost his case in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon and spent nine months in solitary confinement in a six-foot-by-eight-foot cell in the Multnomah County Jail awaiting his appeal to the United States Supreme Court; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Yasui in regard to the military curfew, and he was released from jail only to be incarcerated in the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho. In 1944 he was released and settled in Denver, Colo., where he practiced law and helped found and participated in many organizations, including the Urban League of Metropolitan Denver, the Latin American Research and Service Agency, Denver Native Americans United and various War on Poverty programs.

Yasui and others who had challenged internment reopened their cases in 1984 after learning that the government had introduced false evidence in related court cases. Two years later the Oregon district court overturned his conviction but did not rule on the constitutional issue. However, in 1988, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which called on the president to apologize for internment and pay each surviving internee $20,000.

Oregon Blue Book’s “Notable Oregonians” section does contain an extended biography of Yasui, who died in Denver in 1986 and was buried in Hood River. An endowed chair at the University of Oregon was named in his honor in 2002, the first in the nation for a Japanese American.

The best way to learn about his extraordinary life is to read Lauren Kessler’s seminal Hood River history, “Stubborn Twig.”