Yuri Kochiyama

Yuri Kochiyama grew up comfortable in San Pedro, California, the daughter of a successful fish importer, popular enough at her high school to become its first female student officer. That life ended within hours of Pearl Harbor, when FBI agents took her father into custody on suspicion of espionage over nothing more than photographs of Japanese naval ships found in the house; he came home six weeks later, gravely ill, and died the next day. The family was then sent to an assembly center and on to the Jerome camp in Arkansas, where she organized a letter campaign to the thousands of Japanese American men serving in the segregated Army units the government had incarcerated their own families to distrust.

She married a fellow Nisei soldier, Bill Kochiyama, in 1946 and moved the family to Harlem in 1960, where the couple raised six children and joined the civil rights fights unfolding around them: school boycotts, housing discrimination, a construction-site protest where she and her son were arrested together in October 1963. At the courthouse that day she met Malcolm X, and the two corresponded and organized together until February 21, 1965, when she was in the audience at the Audubon Ballroom and ran to him as he fell, cradling his head as he died. She spent the following decades organizing for Black liberation, Puerto Rican independence and imprisoned radicals of every stripe, and helped build the campaign that won formal reparations for Japanese Americans incarcerated during the war.

The reparations campaign succeeded because Kochiyama and her husband, working through East Coast Japanese Americans for Redress, spent the 1980s framing the internment as a case for the same legal remedy owed to any wrongly imprisoned citizen, and Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, awarding twenty thousand dollars and a formal apology to each survivor. Her own politics ran well past what that campaign's language could contain. By the 1970s she had taken a Republic of New Afrika citizenship oath, corresponded with Puerto Rican nationalist prisoners convicted of shooting up the House chamber, and in 2003 told an interviewer she admired Osama bin Laden alongside Malcolm X and Che Guevara, a comment that cost her real standing with people who had shared decades of the same movement.

Bill Kochiyama died in 1993, and a stroke in 1997 slowed Yuri without stopping her; she kept organizing from Oakland and then from a retirement community until her death on June 1, 2014, at ninety-three. The White House under Barack Obama issued a statement praising her decades of work, and two years later Google marked what would have been her ninety-fifth birthday with a homepage doodle, which drew as much public argument over the bin Laden remark as tribute. A 2005 Nobel Peace Prize nomination and a growing shelf of biographies and documentaries have mostly settled the argument the other way, crediting her with connecting movements that otherwise rarely spoke to each other.

Yuri Kochiyama's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Letter-writing campaign for Nisei soldiers other
  Organized from inside the Jerome, Arkansas incarceration camp 1943
• Harlem civil rights organizing other
  School boycotts and housing-discrimination protests with CORE and the Harlem Parents Committee 1963
• National Committee to Defend Political Prisoners company
  Co-founded to advocate for imprisoned Black Panther and other activists 1970
• Civil Liberties Act of 1988 redress campaign law
  Advocacy that helped win reparations for incarcerated Japanese Americans 1988
• Passing It On book
  Her memoir, published a decade before her death 2004

• May 19, 1921 aged 0 Born Mary Yuriko Nakahara in San Pedro, California
• December 7, 1941 aged 20 Her father is detained by the FBI after Pearl Harbor
• 1942 aged ~21 Sent with her family to Santa Anita, then to Jerome, Arkansas
• February 9, 1946 aged 24 Marries Bill Kochiyama
• 1960 aged ~39 Moves with her family to Harlem
• October 16, 1963 aged 42 Arrested at a construction-site protest; meets Malcolm X that day
• February 21, 1965 aged 43 Present at Malcolm X's assassination and cradles him as he dies
• 1988 aged ~67 The redress campaign succeeds; Reagan signs the Civil Liberties Act
• June 1, 2014 aged 93 Dies in Berkeley, California, at ninety-three

• Malcolm X 1925–1965
  Civil-rights leader whose critique of racism and advocacy of Black dignity reshaped American political thought. cradled him as he died
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. won reparations legislation from
• Huey Newton 1942–1989
  Co-founder of the Black Panther Party who paired armed self-defense with free breakfast and clinic programs. advocated for imprisoned members of