Activist and researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, best known as a hero of the Japanese American redress campaign that culminated in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, died last week. She was 93.
The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan, granted reparations, and perhaps more importantly, an official apology to Japanese Americans who had been removed from the West Coast and incarcerated without trial by the United States government during World War II.
Herzig-Yoshinaga was a high school senior when she was incarcerated with her family at the Manzanar Relocation Center. After the war, while living in New York in the 1960s, she became involved with Asian Americans for Action, and engaged in a variety of political protests and demonstrations, including efforts to end the war in Vietnam and demonstrations against nuclear research.
After to moving to Washington DC in 1978, Herzig-Yoshinaga began looking through the information on the wartime exclusion and incarceration, which was publicly accessible in the National Archives. Over several years, she retrieved and cataloged thousands and significant documents -- including a key piece of "buried" evidence that would become instrumental in the movement for redress.
