Yuri Kochiyama
The life of California-born activist Yuri Kochiyama (1921-2014) reflects the many connections between the Asian American and Civil Rights movements.
Two key events made Kochiyama aware of governmental abuses and shaped her life’s work: her father’s wrongful arrest while recovering from surgery at the time Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and her family’s subsequent wartime incarceration in Jerome, Arkansas. As Kochiyama recalled, “[My father] was the only Japanese in that hospital, so they hung a sheet around him that said, ‘Prisoner of War.’” He died in his home shortly after release from FBI custody.
After WWII, Yuri moved to New York and married Bill Kochiyama, a veteran of the all-Japanese American 442nd Army combat unit. One of the first members of Asian Americans for Action, she befriended Malcolm X and worked to link Asian American rights with Black liberation and racial justice. Later Yuri turned her focus to wrongful convictions and advocated on behalf of political prisoners.
She never wavered in her belief in the power of people – especially young people – to bring about social change.
"Racism has placed all ethnic peoples in similar positions of oppression, poverty, and marginalization.”
- Yuri Kochiyama
Yuri Kochiyama, 1980. Workers at Silver Palace, a now-closed restaurant in New York City’s Chinatown, organized a protest with the Chinese Staff and Workers Association in 1980. They opposed management’s practice of deducting the workers’ tip money for social security benefits. Photo by Corky Lee. © Estate of Corky Lee.
