Minami Tamaki LLP Senior Counsel Donald K. Tamaki spoke November 5 at the Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz to 150 attendees. Past speakers at the lecture series include Toni Morrison, Ezra Klein, and Fania Davis.

The lecture featured the premiere of Reckoning with Redress (RWR). The event marked the 45th anniversary of historic testimony given by survivors and descendants of World War II Japanese American incarceration before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). That testimony helped launch one of the most significant reparations efforts in U.S. history.

Watch Don’s keynote address.

Held at the Cultural Center at Merrill on the UC Santa Cruz campus, the event featured Don's lecture, titled “A Debt Owed–Korematsu, Reparations, and the Ever-Recycling Racial Pathology of 1619,” alongside the launch of the RWR project. RWR is an Open Educational Resource created by Full Spectrum Features Education in partnership with UC Santa Cruz Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder.

The evening also included a screening of the film “Enough,” starring Tamlyn Tomita, Brian Tee, Amy Hill and others, a docu-drama about the historic reparation hearings for WWII incarceration survivors.

The Japanese American Redress Movement remains a landmark chapter in American civil rights history. During World War II, the U.S. government forcibly removed and incarcerated over 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, without due process or individualized evidence of wrongdoing. Decades later, community activists, survivors, and legal advocates mobilized to demand accountability, formal government apologies, and restitution. Their tireless efforts culminated in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which granted a formal presidential apology and financial reparations to surviving incarcerees.

Don played a pivotal role in this movement as part of the historic coram nobis legal team that reopened the 1944 Supreme Court case of Fred Korematsu. The legal team successfully proved that the federal government had suppressed, altered, and destroyed critical intelligence reports showing Japanese Americans posed no security threat during the war. Their work led to the overturning of Korematsu's conviction in 1983, exposing government misconduct and helping lay the factual foundation for the CWRIC's findings and subsequent congressional redress legislation.

In his presentation, Don drew vital connections between the lessons of Japanese American incarceration, the legal battles of Fred Korematsu, and modern-day movement for reparations for the harm of 246 years of slavery, another 100 years of Jim Crow exclusions, and continuing discrimination for most of the 20th century suffered by African Americans.  His lecture included his experience in serving on the ground-breaking California Reparations Task Force, and explored how historic racial injustices recur when constitutional principles are compromised and why understanding this history is essential for safeguarding civil liberties today.

The annual Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture Series serves as a platform for discussing ethics-related challenges in human endeavors. Supported by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics, the series enables the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Division to foster meaningful dialogue on ethics and public responsibility.

Visit https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/reckoning-with-redress-the-legacy-of-japanese-american-incarceration for more information.