Last month, islander Meredith Yasui traveled to Washington, D.C. on a trip fit for a history book: President Barack Obama posthumously awarded her uncle the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

“There were a lot of cheers and tears and emotions, and it was very cool,” Yasui said last week. “It’s really quite an honor, and we are very proud that my uncle was given this award.”

Minoru Yasui died in 1986, but his daughter received the award for his civil rights work and, in particular, for his resistance to Japanese-American internment and curfews after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

He was born in Hood River, Oregon in 1916 and earned both an undergraduate and law degree from the University of Oregon. He became the first Japanese-American lawyer in the state, according to many accounts of his life. Unable to find a job, he opened his own law firm in January 1942 — just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Two months later, he intentionally violated a curfew prohibiting people of Japanese heritage from being out after 8 p.m. In an effort to challenge the new law, he walked up and down the streets repeatedly on the evening of March 28, 1942, and finally went to the Portland police headquarters where a desk sergeant arrested him. He was 25 years old, and he went on to spend nine months in solitary confinement. The judge who sent him to jail also stripped him of his U.S. citizenship. Following his release, he was sent to join his family in an internment camp. In 1944, he was able to leave the camp and settled in Denver, Colorado, where he passed the bar in 1945 but had to appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court to practice law. In the following decades, he dedicated his life to public service and civil rights and is credited with preventing race riots in Denver in the 1970s. He lived in that city until his death and is well known there; the legacy he left behind includes a 16-story high rise building named after him.

In a 1983 television interview, he discussed his intentions behind his arrest and the long legal struggle that followed, which included the United States Supreme Court hearing his case in 1943 and deciding the curfew he broke was a “wartime necessity.”

“My contention, obviously, was if you begin to erode the liberties and freedom and rights of the individual, then you are indeed jeopardizing the safety of our whole nation. That was my position,” he said in the interview, which aired again recently on MSNBC.

His conviction was overturned in 1986 — the year of his death — but too late for him to know of it.

“He was always trying to get a pardon or get his conviction reversed, which he was able to do,” Meredith Yasui said. “He died before he was able to finish that effort. He never did see that happen.”

As a child, Meredith Yasui said she did not see her uncle often, but his story was very much a part of her family’s life.

“We knew quite a bit about my uncle Min. He has always been notorious,” she said.

She noted her family was unusual in that they talked about what had happened to relatives during the war.

“In most families it was not discussed. It felt shameful and was something that was painful,” she said. “My dad was always very vocal about his own story and the wrongness of what happened during the war to Japanese-American people. It is a story my family has always spoken about.”

Her father, Homer, and Minoru were brothers, with Min — as Meredith Yasui calls him — the second oldest of 10 children and her father the second youngest. The war interrupted the lives of many Japanese Americans, including many members of the Yasui family. The war years were profoundly difficult for Meredith’s grandfather, Masuo Yasui, a well-respected businessman and farmer in Hood River. He spoke English well and served as a spokesperson for the community of Japanese farmers there. He even received an award from the Japanese emperor — which worked against him when the war broke out, as officials believed he was collaborating with the Japanese government, Meredith Yasui said. The FBI considered him an “enemy alien” and imprisoned him in federal detention centers during the war. Minoru Yasui, who sat in on his father’s hearing, was not able to prevent his imprisonment for the duration of the war, according to accounts from the University of Oregon.

One of Masuo Yasui’s sons moved east, avoiding relocation to the internment camps, and led a somewhat normal life, Meredith Yasui said, but other family members were also greatly affected. Meredith’s grandmother, Shidzuyo Miyake Yasui, and her two youngest children, including Homer, were sent to an internment camp in California.

The Yasui family story is one that was repeated in countless other families throughout the West Coast, as some 120,000 Japanese Americans, including more than 100 from Vashon, were sent to internment camps.

Island historian Bruce Haulman and demographer Alice Larson are working on what they are calling the Japanese Presence Project and are delving deeply into the history of Japanese people on Vashon to try to bring their stories to life.

On May 16, 1942, Larson said, at least 122 Japanese-American residents of Vashon were evacuated; many were strawberry farmers, and it was one week from harvest time when they had no choice but to comply with the order, taking only two suitcases of belongings with them. A special ferry came to the island to get them and took them to Seattle, where they boarded a train to a central California internment camp.

“The image that sticks in my mind is they go from the lush, ripe strawberry fields of Vashon to the incredible desolation and dust of the desert,” Larson said.

In the Puget Sound region, Haulman said Bainbridge Island treated its Japanese-American residents the best, and Hood River was the opposite, while Vashon was between the two.

“Vashon was both very supportive, and at the same time, there were incidents directed against them,” Larson said, speaking of those with Japanese heritage.

Indeed, Phillip Garber, who served as the editor of the Vashon Island News Record for many of the war years, wrote multiple negative pieces about the former residents and helped foster an anti-Japanese sentiment on Vashon, Haulman said.

Now, looking back at history and with the award recently bestowed on her uncle, Meredith Yasui said she and her extended family are reaching out to tell Minoru Yasui’s story.

“There is no such thing as vindication. It is an important point in the story of civil rights in the United States for this to be recognized, that citizens have rights, and even if it is a time of war, we have a constitution. We have to follow the law of the land, and that was not done,” she said.

It is a message islanders close to the history of Japanese Americans say is relevant today.

“I think particularly now when we are dealing with Syrian refugees and undocumented people from Mexico, it is important for us to realize we have made this mistake once in the past,” Haulman said.

Meredith Yasui concurs.

“The truth is you cannot just make a decision based upon a person’s race,” she said. “When the Japanese people were herded up, there was no evidence of a threat. It was pure racism.”

Against this backdrop, Meredith Yasui said she appreciates what transpired in Washington, D.C., where several members of her extended family gathered and her father got to shake the president’s hand.

“It is important to have recognition for the right things in the world, and the Medal of Freedom is one of those right things, and it feels really good,” she said.