Patsy Takemoto Mink: A Legacy of Courage, Justice, and Firsts
This reflection by Board Member Palma McLaughlin honors the life and legacy of Patsy Takemoto Mink, a trailblazing leader whose work reminds us that democracy, citizenship, and rights must be actively defended. Her story offers timely lessons about courage, advocacy, and the responsibility to stand up for justice, even when it means standing alone.
Patsy Takemoto Mink was 14 when Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor. Her family had lived in Hawaii for three generations. The authorities arrested many prominent Japanese Americans, including her father, who was taken away one night and questioned. He came home the next day, but from then on the Takemotos lived in fear. “It made me realize that one could not take citizenship and the promise of the U.S. Constitution for granted.” As the saying goes, history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Patsy Mink described her approach to public service and politics as one that involved taking risks to advocate for justice and progress: “It is easy enough to vote right and be consistent with the majority. But it is often more important to be ahead of the majority, and this means being willing to cut the first furrow in the ground and stand alone for a while, if necessary.”
Sixty years ago, on January 4, 1965, Patsy Takemoto Mink was sworn in as the first woman of color elected to Congress. Shortly before she was sworn in, Mink said, “I would not see anything wrong with a woman president.” She represented the people of Hawaii during two periods, the first from 1965 to 1977 and again from 1990 until her death in 2002. In 1972, she became the first woman of color to run for president, four months before Shirley Chisholm.
Patsy Mink spent her first years in the House of Representatives helping usher in social welfare programs in the 1960s. She was the principal author of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. In 1967, Mink introduced the first national comprehensive child care bill to Congress. She reintroduced the bill in succeeding Congresses. Eventually, it passed as part of the Office of Economic Opportunity bill, which passed the House in September 1971. President Nixon vetoed the OEO bill. In 1971, the Atomic Energy Commission sought to detonate a large underground nuclear test, code-named Cannikin, off the coast of Alaska. A longtime critic of nuclear testing in the Pacific, she sought to block the test.
When she returned to a very different Congress in the 1990s, she worked tirelessly to defend these same programs from erosion. Speaking against PRWORA, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, often labeled “ending welfare as we know it,” she warned of its consequences.
On the floor of the House on March 24, 1995, Mink stated, “What was a reform effort has now turned into a savage effort to cut away needed funds for our most vulnerable children in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest in America.”
In one of her last speeches, as recorded in the House Journal, IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, Friday, July 26, 2002, she said: “Mr. Speaker, today I introduce legislation to provide health care insurance and food stamp benefits to the unemployed. These Americans live week to week by depleting their savings and relying on meager unemployment compensation payments. They live in fear of emergencies that could send themselves, or one of their children, to a hospital.”
In 2002, Congress officially renamed her landmark Title IX law the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in her honor.
