Norika Flynn, 79; Writer Fought for Civil Rights

Norika Sawada Bridges Flynn, a Japanese American civil-rights activist and writer who successfully challenged Nevada’s law barring mixed marriages, has died. She was 79.

Flynn died Feb. 7 in Palo Alto. The cause of death was not reported.

It was Flynn’s marriage to Harry Bridges, the longtime head of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, in 1958 that upset Nevada’s law barring mixed marriages.

Flynn and Bridges eloped to Reno and tried to marry Dec. 7, 1958. After three days of being barred from even obtaining a marriage license by Nevada officials, Bridges and Flynn went to court. A federal judge ruled that Nevada’s 94-year-old law banning mixed marriages was unconstitutional. On Dec. 11, the couple were married in a Reno courtroom.

Flynn was born Norika Sawada in Gardena in 1923. Her parents were itinerant farmers, and the family made its living growing tomatoes, strawberries and beans in Santa Ana.

In early 1942, her family was ordered to evacuate the West Coast along with more than 100,000 other Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066.

“My mother was fearful that we would be put in the desert where no one could see us, and we would be executed if U.S. hostages were put to death in the war,” Flynn told the Chicago Tribune some years ago. Still, they went, Flynn said, “like sheep ... thinking it was patriotic.”

They took a bus to Poston, Ariz., where they lived at a “relocation center” on an Indian reservation for the duration of the war.

Flynn spent her time teaching dancing, offering classes in the fox-trot, jitterbug and waltz.

After the war, she moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where she worked as a legal secretary. She later worked for Charles Garry, a lawyer best known for defending Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver.

She became politically active, working with the AFL-CIO, and helped in efforts to relocate Japanese Americans returning to the West Coast from internment camps. She also became active in efforts to gain reparations from the U.S. government for those held in the camps.

At the age of 50, Flynn, who had spent a year in junior college before her family was ordered to evacuate, enrolled at San Francisco State University. She became an accomplished writer whose work appeared in Harper’s and Ms. magazines.

After Bridges’ death in 1990, she married Ed Flynn, a former head of the Pacific Maritime Assn. who had often battled Bridges in labor talks over the years.

In addition to Flynn, she is survived by her daughter, Katherine Bridges Wiggins; and two stepchildren, Robert Bridges and Marie Shell.

Memorial services are pending.