Patsy Takemoto Mink is being honored this year by her image appearing on a new quarter as part of the U.S. Mint’s American Women Quarters Program. The Mink quarter is the third to be released from 2022 to 2025 by the mint, which will issue a new quarter each year featuring a distinguished American woman.

Throughout her almost 50 years of public service to Hawaii and the nation, Mink was the most consistently progressive elected leader from the islands, who advocated especially for racial and gender equality, access to education and women’s rights.

I proudly share Maui roots with Mink, including in Hamakuapoko where she and my paternal grandmother were both born. My mother attended Maui High School at the old campus in that small town at the same time as her and once told me that Mink was active in school activities already in her freshman year.

Politically, although she was sansei or third generation, Mink was part of the nisei or second generation of Japanese American Democrats, who would lead the Legislature following the 1954 elections. At that time, with her University of Chicago law degree, she was a staff attorney for the territorial House of Representatives and would be elected to that body two years later.

Besides not being nisei, Mink was a woman in contrast to all the other Japanese legislators, Democrat and Republican. Most of them were World War II veterans, who had gone to college or law school on the GI Bill and, furthermore, considered that politics was a man’s world and that only men should lead.

Nonetheless, Mink’s lengthy political career includes an impressive list of her being the first person of her ethnicity or gender or both to accomplish a particular feat. The achievement that she said she was most proud of was being the first woman of color to serve in Congress, as she was starting in 1965 as a U.S. Representative from Hawaii.

Well before Barack Obama, Mink was also the first person from our state to run for U.S. president as she did in 1972 after being recruited to be an anti-Vietnam War candidate in the Oregon Democratic presidential primary election.

Despite most people in Hawaii supporting the war, Mink was an early and outspoken critic of U.S. involvement. In 1972, during the stalled peace talks in Paris to end the conflict, she traveled there with fellow U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug to meet with representatives of the North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong, besides the South Vietnamese delegation.

This bold initiative undoubtedly cost “Patsy Pink” — as some critics called her — some votes and campaign contributions from Japanese American World War II veterans, who continued their long-term support of fellow veterans Dan Inouye and Spark Matsunaga. The latter defeated Mink in her 1976 bid for the U.S. Senate.

Of her many legislative accomplishments, Mink will be long remembered as the principal author of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits gender discrimination in educational institutions that receive federal funds.

Its 35 words straightforwardly state, “No person in the United States shall, based on sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Title IX has had a profound impact on American society in engendering the social equality that Mink advocated for throughout her political career. Since its enactment, it has enabled millions of women, particularly those of color, to attend and graduate from college and graduate and professional school.

In a lasting tribute to her steadfast support of civil rights and public education, Congress renamed Title IX as the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act following her death in 2002. 

I consider Mink the last of Hawaii’s Democratic Party leaders elected in the 1950s and 1960s to consistently uphold the values and ideals that the party stood for when it gained control of the Legislature, the governor’s office and our congressional delegation.

Long before she died, the party and its leaders had become centrist and had abandoned its core principles, particularly racial equality and social justice. Instead, staying in power became a primary goal.

By the 1980s, the Democrats were no longer the party that had lowered tuition at the University of Hawaii, raised the minimum wage, abolished the death penalty and made Hawaii the first state to legalize abortion and to require employers to provide health care insurance to their workers. 

As a result, Mink paid dearly for adhering to her political ideals by losing several major elections, including for U.S. senator, governor and mayor of Honolulu. In an excellent documentary on her life and legacy directed by local filmmaker Kimberlee Bassford, titled very appropriately “Ahead of the Majority,” Mink declares in a speech, “I’ve run many, many times, and I’ve lost many times, but I’ve never given up the feeling that I as an individual and you as an individual can make a difference.”

Her spotty record of electoral success is in marked contrast to those of other Democratic leaders from the 1950s, including George Ariyoshi, Dan Inouye and Spark Matsunaga, who never lost an election in their respective lengthy political careers. Mink lost elections because she stuck to her principles and values rather than taking positions to gain votes.

In an interview 10 years after her death, longtime Hawaii political analyst Dan Boylan remarked on Mink’s strong political will.

“She had a passion for her causes and her work, and she never gave up,” he said. “I think she made compromises along the way. But she made a hell of a lot fewer than most politicians. She was a principled politician.”

Insofar as Mink served most of her political career in Congress, it would be unfair to compare any of our current state legislators to her and her remarkable record of notable and lasting accomplishments.

Nonetheless, at the state level, we can ask who among them, particularly Democrats, approaches Mink’s record of developing policies for the overall benefit of society, especially its disadvantaged members, rather than seeking to advance their political self-interest, including reelection or election to higher office.