Join us for a conversation and book signing with the museum’s Elizabeth MacMillan Director, Anthea M. Hartig; former Cabinet Secretary Norman Mineta; and Andrea Warren, author of Enemy Child: The Story of Norman Mineta, a Boy Imprisoned in a Japanese American Internment Camp During World War II. The talk will focus on Secretary Mineta’s extraordinary story of meeting a great civil injustice with incredible fortitude and dignity.
Before Norman Mineta became a distinguished American statesman, he endured a harsh childhood. Along with 120,000 people of Japanese descent, he and his family were forcibly removed from their home and community by the U.S. government and sent to an incarceration camp. He was sent to Heart Mountain in Wyoming. Enemy Child vividly recounts how, at just 10 years of age, Mineta’s sunny life in San Jose, California, was replaced by brutal weather, inhumane living conditions, and forced confinement within the walls of an American incarceration camp.
The book thoughtfully traces a time of hardship, resilience, and patriotism for Japanese Americans, as Mineta gracefully walks from the bright innocence of childhood into wartime prejudice and finally to the halls of Congress, where he becomes the first Asian American Cabinet Secretary.
The discussion was moderated by Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History.
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