To celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’ll be using each Day in Denver History segment throughout May to spotlight AAPI Denverites who have helped shape our city. This week: Minoru Yasui.
Known for his cross-cultural advocacy in Denver, the lawyer was a member and one-time leader of the city’s Community Relations Commission from the 1950s through the ‘80s. But Yasui’s civil rights work began long before he moved to Denver — he was arrested in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, in 1942 for intentionally walking city streets after a military-enforced curfew imposed on Japanese American citizens during World War II. He took the fight to the supreme court, was jailed for nine months, and eventually sent to the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho. He later moved to Denver and had to fight to be allowed to take the bar exam, going all the way to the Colorado supreme court to win the right.
He continued to work for the civil rights of Japanese Americans and other marginalized communities throughout his time in the Mile High — Yasui was a founding member of the Black community-centered Urban League of Denver, the Latin American Research and Service Agency, and Denver Native Americans United. He fought for more than 40 years to overturn his own wartime arrest convictions and was finally successful in 1986, the year he died. President Obama posthumously awarded Minoru Yasui the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
Special thanks to the Densho Encyclopedia for information and resources.
