Yuri Kochiyama

Yuri Kochiyama was a peace and justice activist who advocated for liberation for all marginalized groups. She grew up in California and, by her own account, was politically unaware into her early 20s. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the government sent her family to a concentration camp in Arkansas. She spent 2 years in the camp and was awoken to social and political injustice directed to Japanese Americans and to Black Americans in the Jim Crow south. After the war, she married and moved to New York. Living in a housing project surrounded by mostly Black and Puerto Rican neighbors inspired her to become involved with the civil rights movement. In the early 60s, she and her family moved to Harlem where she enrolled in "freedom schools" to learn about Black history and culture. She became deeply involved in community activism. After being detained by police in a protest over discriminatory hiring practices in 1963, she met Malcolm X when he came to lend support to those arrested and developed a friendship with him.

In her life, Kochiyama advocated for racial justice, Puerto Rican independence, anti-imperialism, labor organizing, nuclear disarmament, reparations for Japanese American internees, the anti-war movement, and the rights of people imprisoned by the U.S. government for violent offenses whom she considered to be political prisoners.