Passing of AAPI Leader Norm Mineta during AAPI Heritage Month
Norman Yoshio Mineta is a leader in the AAPI community, having risen to be mayor of the City of San Jose (where the airport is named after him), spent two decades in the U.S. House of Representatives, and served as U.S. Secretary of Transportation during 9/11 and U.S. Secretary of Commerce. His passing in the first week of AAPI Heritage Month, which he pressed Congress to create in 1977 and 1978 (history told in a prior ImmigrationProf post), is immense.
Among the AAPI community, he is revered. Secretary Mineta founded, funded, or cultivated many of the key institutions in policy and politics. He was the first Asian American to serve in a presidential cabinet. He co-founded the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. He founded the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, which has mentored Asian American youth interested in policy (including a scholarship for a college internship I spent at the U.S. Department of Justice and another that my partner spent at the National Asian Pacific American Leadership Consortion in law school) and encouraged Asian American politicians to run for national office. His memories as a young boy interned with his Japanese-American immigrant family during World War II drove him to lead the fight for reparations in Congress and stayed with him as he battled racial profiling against Muslims after September 11 (which occurred at the start of his term as Secretary of Transportation).
Secretary Mineta built a national reputation over a long political career as a Democrat who worked across party lines, enacting bipartisan legislation and serving in the cabinet of a Republican and Democratic president as President Bush’s Transportation Secretary and President Clinton’s Commerce Secretary. He served as an army intelligence officer in Korea and Japan. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006 under President Obama. An award-winning documentary from the Mineta Legacy Projects memorializes his life achievements, Norman Mineta and His Legacy: An American Story, and can be accessed here and here.
MHC