A Historic Return

By John Tateishi
Published July 4, 2008

In July, the JACL returns to Salt Lake City for its convention. It's a historic return, one which celebrates the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Liberties Act.

It's also the 30th anniversary of the historic launching of the JACL's redress campaign, which was launched from the Little America Hotel in Salt Lake City in 1978, beginning a most improbable campaign that everyone but us thought was doomed to failure.

We went to Salt Lake City determined to set a course for redress when the organization accepted the Salt Lake City guidelines: $25,000 in individual payments, an apology, and the creation of an educational trust fund. These were our demands to redress the injustices of the WWII internment of Japanese Americans.

In response to Calif. Sen. S. I. Hayakawa's keynote speech in which he called our demands "absurd and ridiculous," and in doing so, "Sleepy Sam," as he was sometimes referred to by the media, did us a favor. We responded by launching our campaign with press releases to all major media around the country calling Hayakawa's total ignorance about the injustices of the WWII internment absurd and ridiculous.

The strategy was to begin with an educational campaign: to educate the American public about the internment, to educate the Congress about the injustice, and to educate the JA community about the ways in which the government violated our rights and set a dangerous precedent for the nation. We had to educate ourselves and the public before we could find our way through the Congress with legislation.

Within a year, with a legislative strategy in place, we had drafted a bill that was introduced in both the Senate and House and we embarked on a nationwide grassroots legislative campaign to push the commission bill through the Congress. JACL members and chapters became a lobbying machine that would accomplish the impossible by helping to get our bill to the president's desk for signature.

As both Dan Inouye and Norm Mineta said at the passage of the commission bill, our success in this, our initial legislative fight, would help carry us through to the next battle, the fight for redress legislation.

But first, we had the Commission to deal with, and with the help of groups like the NCRR, churches, and other community organizations helping individual JAs prepare their testimonies for the commission hearings, over 750 JAs testified to tell their personal stories about their internment experiences. It was powerful testimony covered by the national media and turned the tide of the nation on the issue of the WWII injustice.

The Commission's report made national news when it stated that the internment was unjustified and was a consequence of "race, greed and a failure of political leadership." The report's conclusions were unequivocal and a strong indictment of the government's actions against our community during WWII. And the Commission's recommendations, issued six months later, made national news again as it urged remedial action in the form of an apology and $20,000 in individual payments.

That was in June 1983, and before year's end, we worked with the JA members of Congress to introduce bills in the Senate and House, using verbatim the language of the Commission's recommendations.