Interviews

1. How he got into politics

2. “Work hard at the job you’re at”

3. Beginnings of CWRIC

4. Finding supporters for the bill

5. Getting Jim Wright to sponsor the bill

6. Findings of the commission report

7. Bill 442

8. Speaker pro tem on the day the bill went to the House

9. Citizen participation

10. The last hurdle – President Reagan

11. Signing of the bill

12. “No racial profiling”

Mineta,Norman Yoshio

(b. 1931) U.S. Former Secretary of Transportation

Findings of the commission report

You know, then the final commission report, it came out and said that there was a "gross violation of the constitutional rights of people of Japanese ancestry." And it said that the... that redress, an apology and a redress payment, they recommended $20,000 should be made, and that the reason the evacuation and internment occurred was because of historical racial discrimination, wartime hysteria, and weak political leadership. And so it really, it just, it brought everything together, all the loose ends. And it dealt with the "magic cable" issue, I mean, it just, when people were saying, "Well, what about those 'magic cables'?" then you could hold up the report and say, "Well they studied that issue, and it was a lot of nonsense."

Date: July 4, 2008

Location: Colorado, US

Interviewer: Tom Ikeda

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Norman Mineta was born on November 12, 1931 in San Jose, California. He and his family were incarcerated at the Heart Mountain internment camp during World War II.

He began his political career when he was appointed to a vacant San Jose City Council seat in San Jose and was elected to the seat the following term, followed by vice mayor and then becoming Mayor of San Jose in 1971.

Mineta served in the United States House of Representatives from 1975 to 1995 and was a key figure behind the passage of H.R. 442, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which officially apologized for and redressed the unconstitutional, mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

In 2000, he became the first Asian American to hold a post in the presidential cabinet when President Clinton appointed Mineta as his Secretary of Commerce. The following year, President George W. Bush appointed him Secretary of Transportation, the only Democrat in Bush's cabinet, where he served as the longest serving Secretary of Transportation since the position was created in 1967. (December 2011)