Thursday, November 5, 2026
6-8 pm
FREE
Join us for a screening of One Fighting Irishman, a film by Sharon Yamato and Evan Kodani, followed by a panel discussion around immigrant rights, Japanese American history, and allyship. Narrated by George Takei, this 30-minute documentary tells the story of Wayne M. Collins, the San Francisco civil rights attorney who prevented more than 5,500 Japanese Americans from being deported after imprisonment at the Tule Lake Segregation Center, considered the worst of America’s ten WWII concentration camps.
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Sharon Yamato, Dale Minami, Karen Korematsu, Wayne Collins, moderated by Justice Tracie Brown. Light refreshments will be served. Register for free tickets at the link below.
This event is sponsored by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee and Campaign for Justice, the Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society, the San Francisco Irish Consulate, the Northern District Historical Society and the Federal Bar Association, Northern District of California Chapter.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Sharon Yamato is a writer/journalist, TV producer, and independent filmmaker whose latest film, One Fighting Irishman, tells the story of attorney Wayne Collins and his fight to restore American citizenship for more than 5,000 renunciants held at the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Her other films include Out of Infamy: Michi Nishiura Weglyn, A Flicker in Eternity, and Moving Walls, for which she wrote an accompanying book, Moving Walls: The Barracks of America’s Concentration Camps. She has written articles for the Los Angeles Times and is a columnist for the Los Angeles daily newspaper, The Rafu Shimpo
Presiding Justice Tracie L. Brown was appointed to California’s First District Court of Appeal in 2018 and elevated to the position of Presiding Justice of Division Four in 2023. She had previously served for five years on the San Francisco Superior Court.
Justice Brown graduated from Harvard University and received her J.D. from the U.C. Berkeley School of Law. She clerked for Judge M. Margaret McKeown on the Ninth Circuit and was an associate at Morrison & Foerster and Cooley LLP. She then joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where she tried civil and criminal cases and argued before the Ninth Circuit.
Justice Brown received the Asian American Bar Association’s Joe Morozumi Award and the California State Bar’s Jack Berman Award for her work on a pro bono case representing San Francisco’s Japanese American community. She was honored with a U.S. Department of Justice Director’s Award for prosecuting three defendants who distributed millions of doses of controlled substances through an online “pill mill.”
Justice Brown taught trial advocacy at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law for approximately ten years, and frequently guest-teaches at Stanford Law School, University of San Francisco Law School, and U.C. Law San Francisco (formerly known as Hastings). Justice Brown is actively involved with numerous organizations, including the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area, the California Asian Pacific American Judges Association, the American Law Institute, California Women Lawyers, California Women Judges, and the Bar Association of San Francisco.