Early years (1929–1941) In 1929, several already-established Nisei organizations merged to form the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), most prominent among them Fresno's (headed by Nisei UC educated dentist Dr. Thomas T. Yatabe, 1897–1977), the , and the San Francisco-based (headed by Nisei UC educated lawyer
Saburo Kido, 1902–1977). the nascent JACL chose to hold its first national conference in Seattle in 1930. It soon after began work to expand the citizenship rights of
Japanese and other
Asian Americans, who were considered unassimilable to American society and therefore ineligible for naturalization under the
Immigration Act of 1924. Their first target was the
Cable Act of 1922, which revoked the citizenship of women who married men ineligible for citizenship, namely
Asian immigrants. After a successful lobbying campaign, Congress amended the act in 1931. Next, the JACL began a campaign to allow Issei and other Asian American veterans of the
First World War to become U.S. citizens.
World War II incarceration (1941–1945) In 1941, within hours of the
Imperial Japanese Navy's
attack on Pearl Harbor, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began arresting Japanese American community leaders (mostly Issei Japanese language school teachers, priests, martial arts instructors, and business owners). Members of the JACL testified at government hearings to promote a picture of Nisei as loyal and patriotic Americans, an effort to counteract rumors of
fifth column activity that had spread in the wake of Pearl Harbor. At the same time, the JACL aided FBI and
Naval Intelligence officials to identify potentially disloyal Issei, a move many Japanese Americans argued tried to buy political safety for a small segment of the community at the expense of its more vulnerable members. When President
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed
Executive Order 9066, JACL leadership did not question the constitutionality of the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the
West Coast. Instead, arguing it would better serve the community to follow government orders without protest, the organization advised the approximately 120,000 affected to go peacefully and distanced itself from those who actively opposed the order. Throughout the war, the JACL made efforts to ensure some measure of protection and comfort for Japanese Americans resettling outside government concentration camps, providing loans and establishing offices in Chicago to assist families resettling in the Midwest. and the
442nd Regiment Combat Team, when 10,000 signed up with eventually 2,686 being chosen to join the 1,500 from the mainland.
Redress (1945–1988) Following the war, the JACL began to rebuild. In 1945, only 23 chapters remained, nearly all located away from the West Coast. In 1946, as internees struggled to return only to find that pre-war Japanese communities were gone and mostly could not be restored, JACL chapters reappeared in the major West Coast cities, totally 39. By 1950, many of the earlier chapters had been reactivated, bring the total to 80. From then until 1970, the list of chapters remained fairly constant, still concentrated in the West, but with important chapters in the big cities of the Midwest and East Coast. In 1948, the JACL succeeded in gaining passage of the
Evacuation Claims Act, the first of a series of efforts to rectify the losses and injustices of the World War II incarceration. In 1949, the JACL initiated efforts in the U.S. Congress to gain the right of Japanese immigrants to become
naturalized citizens of the U.S. In 1970, the JACL endorsed a resolution, introduced by member
Edison Uno, to urge Congress to compensate each camp survivor for each day they had spent in confinement. Later, in 1979, the JACL's National Committee for Redress proposed the creation of a federal commission to investigate the incarceration. The following year, the JACL, with help from Senators
Daniel Inouye and
Spark Matsunaga, pushed a bill through Congress to create the
Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). In 1983, the CWRIC published its findings and recommended an official Government apology and redress payments to survivors. This was granted with the passage of the
Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and signed by President
Ronald Reagan.
Post-redress (1988–present) In 1994, at its national convention, the JACL passed a resolution affirming its commitment to and support of the basic human right of marriage, including the right to marry for
same-sex couples. In 2012, the JACL was the first national civil rights membership organization to publicly and actively adopt this position, and praised President
Barack Obama for his support for
same-sex marriage. Since 2022, the JACL has championed the cause of
reparations for slavery. In addition to endorsing local proposals for reparations, JACL has demanded the
Biden administration begin the process of studying federal reparations for
African Americans. ==Programs==