Bernard B. Kliks papers relating to Minoru Yasui and University of Oregon Law School reunions, circa 1938-1993

Bernard "Barney" B. Kliks was born in 1915 in McMinnville, Oregon. He studied at the University of Oregon Law School in Eugene, Oregon, and was a classmate of Minoru Yasui (1916-1986). Kliks was admitted to the Oregon bar in 1939, and worked as an attorney in Portland, Oregon. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Kliks died in 2001.

Sources: Vital and census records on Ancestry.com; articles in the Oregonian, April 30, 1944 and September 2, 1971.

Minoru "Min" Yasui was born in 1916 in Hood River, Oregon. His father, Masuo Yasui (1886-1957) was a businessman and community leader in Hood River. Minoru Yasui attended the University of Oregon Law School, graduating in 1939.

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States' entry into World War II, the U.S. government issued a series of military orders targeted at Japanese Americans, including a curfew. Yasui, who believed that these orders were an unconstitutional breach of U.S. citizens' rights, deliberately violated the curfew on March 28, 1942, so that he would be arrested and could then challenge the curfew in court. At Yasui's trial, Judge Alger Fee ruled that the military orders were indeed unconstitutional, but also ruled that, because he had worked at the Japanese consulate in Chicago, Illinois, Yasui had voided his U.S. citizenship. Yasui appealed his case, and spent nine months in solitary confinement at the Multnomah County Jail in Portland, Oregon, while the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that Yasui was a U.S. citizen, but that the government could override the rights of citizens during wartime on the basis of their race. Following this ruling, the government sent Yasui to the Minidoka incarceration camp in Idaho, where he remained unil his release in 1944.

After the war, Yasui moved to Denver, Colorado. There, he continued to pursue civil rights issues both through his law practice and then as executive director of the Commission on Community Relations. In 1976, he began working on a Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) committee addressing the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and in 1981 became the committee's chair. The following year, Yasui began exploring the possibility of reopening his own case based on recently publicized materials at the National Archives demonstrating that military orders directed at Japanese Americans during World War II had been motivated by racial discrimination rather than military necessity. The U.S. District Court of Oregon vacated Yasui's indictment and conviction, but refused to permit an evidentiary hearing to rule on the role racial discrimination had played in World War II directives. Yasui appealed, but he died in November 1986 before the case was resolved. The U.S. government moved to dismiss Yasui's appeal as moot, which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed.

In 2015, U.S. President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Yasui the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2016, the Oregon Legislature voted to designate March 28 as Minoru Yasui Day.

Sources: "Minoru Yasui (1916-1986)," by Peggy Nagae, Oregon Encyclopedia, https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/yasui_minoru_1916_1986_/#.YzxrnHbMIuV; Stubborn Twig, by Lauren Kessler (Corvallis, Or: Oregon State University Press, 2005).