On this, the 20th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, I've received a number of invitations to speak about the internment and about Redress at various events throughout the year.
I'm often asked if, when I launched the campaign in 1978, I thought we had a chance to succeed since nothing like this had ever been attempted before. My answer is usually very measured because I was hopeful as we all were, but I questioned whether we could get a compensation bill demanding $3 billion through the Congress, but I did think we could succeed in educating the public about the internment. It was important - no, critical - to us that this country learned about the camps and the historic constitutional breach committed by the government during World War II. If we achieved nothing else, that would have been a measure of success.
But I did think we could achieve some degree of success in that area, although even that was an uphill battle because in those days, it was virtually impossible to get even local news outlets to run stories about the internment. And in 1978, virtually no one knew about the camps outside the Japanese American community, and those who did for the most part thought what happened to us might have been unfortunate but was justified.
In addition to all that, we were a community of less than one half of one percent of the American population, with no real wealth, no real political clout, a community deeply divided on the issue. In 1978, it was obvious that most JAs were uninformed about why we ended up in the camps and understood little if anything about the manipulations of government. We were totally unprepared as a community to wage a political battle of this magnitude. We were neophytes in the political arena, but we believed in the cause and were fully committed as an organization to make it right. And we had four JA friends in the Congress.
As the newly appointed chair of the JACL's Redress Committee, I capitalized on the two things going for us coming out of the Salt Lake City convention: first, while the media had always ignored the issue of the camps, we now had a set of demands that the media could no longer ignore and thus gave us an entree to talk publicly about the camps, and second, I was determined to focus the entire public debate on constitutional arguments to make this an inherently American issue. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that was more American than the Constitution, and that was where our argument and our claims lay.
Those two issues - our demands for monetary compensation and the Constitution as the basis for the campaign - combined to evolve media interest, which is exactly what I wanted and needed to generate a viable campaign.
Fortunately, that strategy worked and before six months passed, news stories about the internment had been on the networks and appeared in newspapers across the country. A year after the 1978 convention, we introduced a bill in both the House and Senate, and exactly two years after Clifford Uyeda was elected JACL president, we were at the White House for a signing ceremony for the bill that established the commission which investigated the circumstances that led to the internment and detention policies.
Coming out of the Salt Lake City convention, my answer to the question about whether I felt we had a chance for success was measured in terms of educating the public. But I knew even that would be a difficult challenge, something we knew from our experiences in California. But we were able to achieve that goal far beyond anyone's expectations. And as I walked the halls of Congress and lobbied for passage of the commission bill in those months of 1979 and 1980, it occurred to me that there actually was a possibility that we could achieve the impossible. As I met with House members who opposed the commission bill and was able to convince them to support the measure, I realized then that we could actually get a Redress bill through the Congress successfully if we did this right.
After the commission bill had passed and I continued lobbying House members to build support for the Redress bill that would follow, I came to believe that it was truly possible that we could get a Redress bill through the House, our biggest challenge.
It wasn't exactly a revelatory moment for me, but a realization that if we kept doing what we were doing - working the issue around constitutional arguments and coordinating my lobbying on the Hill with the grassroots efforts being orchestrated by Bill Yoshino in the Midwest and East, where the crucial and majority of votes were - we actually could win this battle.
The JACL continued working this strategy, all the way to the end when Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, one of the hallmark legislative achievements in this country. It was a moment we celebrated then and an achievement we can continue to be proud of 20 years later.
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