Dale Minami is a partner with Minami Tamaki in San Francisco specializing in the area of Personal Injury for which he has been named a SuperLawyer in Northern California for each year from 2004 through 2017 and a Top Ten SuperLawyer for the last 5 years.
He received a law degree at Berkeley Law during a formative time of anti-war, counterculture, civil rights, and ethnic studies movements in the San Francisco Bay Area. After he graduated, Minami and fellow Asian American law students and graduates started a collective to help poor Asian Americans in the Bay Area. He then opened the first legal services non-profit for Asian Americans in the U.S. in 1972. The Asian Law Caucus represented clients and also raised public awareness about discrimination and went on to form their own firm in 1975. In 1981, documents were discovered in the National Archives proving that government lawyers during World War II had intentionally suppressed and altered evidence in Fred Korematsu’s Supreme Court Case, Korematsu v. United States, which challenged the incarceration of Japanese Americans. Minami became lead attorney on the case ultimately led to Korematsu’s exoneration and a public statement by the court that condemned the racist exclusion orders.
He is a co-founder of the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area, the first Asian American Bar Association in the United States; the Asian Pacific Bar of California; and the Coalition of Asian Pacific Americans, one of the nation’s first political action committees focused on Asian American candidates and issues.
Chapters is a multi-part series concerning the history and the lessons of civil rights violations or civil liberties injustices carried out against communities or populations—including civil rights violations or civil liberties injustices that are perpetrated on the basis of an individual’s race, national origin, immigration status, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
This project was made possible with support from Chapman University and The California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library.
Guest: Dale Minami
Host: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Produced by: Past Forward
Date recorded: February 12, 2025
Past Forward is providing this podcast as a public service. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Please read our Program and Product Disclaimer for more information.
