Norman Mineta saw his father cry for the first time on December 7, 1941.
“He couldn’t understand why the land of his birth was attacking the land of his heart.”
Kunisaku Mineta had arrived in America from Japan at age fourteen, in 1902, worked as a laborer on a sugar beet farm, learned English, advanced into management, and eventually established a thriving insurance business in California.
On May 29, 1942, ten-year-old Mineta and his family left San Jose on a train of about fifty cars carrying the local Japanese American community to Santa Anita Racetrack in Los Angeles, which was among the temporary centers where detainees assembled while internment camps were built.
The family spent much of the war at the Heart Mountain camp near Cody, Wyoming. They returned home to San Jose on Thanksgiving Day 1945, Mineta recalls. “Even thinking about it now makes me cry.”
Mineta entered public life in 1962, with an appointment to the San Jose Human Relations Commission. He became mayor in 1971. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1975, Mineta served for twenty years, introducing the bill that redressed the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans.
On September 11, 2001, when America was attacked again, Mineta was now Secretary of Transportation, appointed by President George W. Bush. He set up the Transportation Security Administration and within a year hired 65,000 employees, informing them with a lesson from his past.
“I said that there was not going to be any racial profiling.”
