Yuri Kochiyama, center. 

Yuri Kochiyama (河内山百合, May 19, 1921 – June 1, 2014) was a Japanese American human rights activist. She is notable as one of the
few prominent non-black black separatists. Influenced by Marxism, Maoism, and the thoughts of Malcolm X, she was an advocate for
many revolutionary movements.

Early life and education

Mary Yuriko Nakahara, who later become well known as Yuri Kochiyama, was born on May 19, 1921, in San Pedro, California to Japanese
immigrants Seiichi Nakahara, a fish merchant entrepreneur, and Tsuyako (Sawaguchi) Nakahara, a college-educated homemaker and piano
teacher. She had a twin brother, Peter, and an older brother, Arthur. Her family was relatively affluent and she grew up in a
predominantly white neighborhood. In her youth she attended a Presbyterian church and taught Sunday school. Kochiyama attended San
Pedro High School, where she served as the first female student body officer, wrote for the school newspaper, and played on the
tennis team. She graduated from high school in 1939. She attended Compton Junior College, where she studied English, journalism, and
art. Kochiyama graduated from Compton in 1941.

Her life changed on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese Empire bombed Pearl Harbor. Soon after she returned home from church, FBI
agents arrested her father as a potential threat to national security. He was in poor health, having just come out of the hospital.
While her father was in federal prison he was denied medical care, and by the time he was released on January 20, 1942, he had
become too sick to speak. Her father died the day after his release.

Soon after the death of her father, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the forced removal of approximately
120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific coast. Yuri, her mother, and brother were "evacuated" to a converted horse
stable at the Santa Anita Assembly Center for several months and then moved again to the War Relocation Authority internment camp at
Jerome, Arkansas, where they lived for the next three years. While interned, she met her future husband, Bill Kochiyama, a Nisei
soldier fighting for the United States. The couple married in 1946.[1] Then, they moved to New York in 1948, had six children, and
lived in public housing for the next twelve years. In 1960, Kochiyama and her husband Bill moved their family to Harlem and joined
the Harlem Parents Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Activist work

Kochiyama met the African-American activist Malcolm X, at the time a prominent member of the Nation of Islam, in October 1963
during a protest against the arrest of about 600 minority construction workers in Brooklyn, who had been protesting for
jobs.Kochiyama joined his Pan-Africanist Organization of Afro-American Unity. She was present at his assassination on February 21,
1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, New York City, and held him in her arms as he lay dying. A famous photo
appeared in Life magazine capturing that moment.Kochiyama in the mid-1960s joined the Revolutionary Action Movement, a clandestine
revolutionary nationalist organization which was one of the first organizations in the black liberation movement to attempt to
construct a revolutionary nationalism based on a synthesis of the thought of Malcolm X, Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong. She was one of
the few non-blacks invited to join the Republic of New Africa (RNA, established in 1968) which advocated the establishment of a
separate black nation in the U.S. South. Kochiyama joined, and subsequently sided with, an RNA faction which felt that the need to
build a separate black nation was even more important than the struggle for civil rights in Northern cities.

In 1977, Kochiyama joined the group of Puerto Ricans who took over the Statue of Liberty to draw attention to the struggle for
Puerto Rican independence. Kochiyama and other activists demanded the release of four Puerto Rican nationalists convicted of
attempted murder—Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irving Flores Rodríguez—who in 1954 had opened
fire in the House of Representatives, injuring five congressmen. According to Kochiyama, despite a strong movement enabling them to
occupy the statue for nine hours, they intended to "give up peacefully when the police came." After the four Puerto Ricans were
tried, convicted, and effectively given life imprisonments, they were eventually pardoned by President Jimmy Carter and released.
Yuri also had close relationships with many other revolutionary nationalist leaders including Robert F. Williams (who gave Yuri her
first Red Book of quotations by Mao Zedong).

Kochiyama became a mentor during the Asian American movement that grew during and after the Vietnam War protests. Many young
activists came to her for support for several of the Asian American protests. Due to her civil rights experience, Yuri and Bill—
along with several Japanese American organizations on the East Coast and West Coast—advocated for reparations and a government
apology for injustices toward Japanese-Americans during the internment. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in
1988 which, among other things, awarded $20,000 to each Japanese-American internment survivor. In later years, Kochiyama was active
in opposing the profiling and bigotry toward Muslims, Middle Easterners, and South Asians in the United States, a phenomenon many
view as similar to the experience of Japanese Americans during World War II.

In 1971, Kochiyama secretly converted to Sunni Islam, and began travelling to the Sankore mosque in Greenhaven prison, Stormville,
New York, to study and worship with Imam Rasul Suleiman. Over the years, Kochiyama dedicated herself to various causes, such as
the rights of those she regarded as political prisoners. She worked on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an African-American activist
sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, nuclear disarmament and reparations
for the internment of Japanese Americans. Through her activism—starting in the 1960s and continuing into the mid-2000s—Yuri
participated in the Black, Asian-American, and Third World movements for civil rights, human rights, Black liberation, political
prisoners, ethnic studies, anti-war, and other social justice issues.

In 2005, Kochiyama was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize through the “1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005” project. In a
lifetime of community service starting in her hometown of San Pedro, California, Yuri also taught English to immigrant students and
volunteered at soup kitchens and homeless shelters in New York City. Yuri spoke at over 100 high schools and colleges in at least 15
states and Canada, including Harvard, Radcliffe, Yale, Princeton, Spelman, Temple, UMass/Amherst, New York University, UC Berkeley,
and San Francisco State University. In 2010, she received an Honorary Doctorate Degree from California State University, East Bay.
In Debbie Allen’s television series Cool Women (2001), Yuri stated, “The legacy I would like to leave is that people try to build
bridges and not walls.”

Advocacy

Kochiyama was a friend and supporter of Assata Shakur, an African-American activist and member of the former Black Liberation Army
(BLA), who has been convicted of several crimes including the first-degree murder of a New Jersey State Trooper before escaping from
U.S. prison and receiving asylum in Cuba. She stated that to her Shakur was like "the female Malcolm [X] or the female Mumia [Abu-
Jamal]." 

Kochiyama was an outspoken admirer of Mao Zedong. She praised Malcolm X for his "admiration for Mao and Ho Chi Minh", and worked
closely with the Revolutionary Action Movement, an "urban guerrilla warfare" organization based on "a synthesis of the thought of
Malcolm X, Marx and Lenin, and Mao Zedong."

Kochiyama supported the Peruvian Maoist group, Shining Path, which is classified by the Peruvian government, the U.S., the European
Union, and Canada as a terrorist organization and has been widely condemned for its brutality, including violence deployed against
peasants, trade union organizers, popularly elected officials and the general civilian population. She joined a delegation to Peru,
organized by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, to gather support for Abimael Guzman, leader of the Shining Path. Kochiyama
stated "[t]he more I read, the more I came to completely support the revolution in Peru."

Kochiyama supported Yu Kikumura, an alleged member of the Japanese Red Army, who was arrested in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam in
1986 when he was found carrying a bomb in his luggage and subsequently convicted of planning to bomb a US Navy recruitment office in
the Veteran's Administration building. Kochiyama felt Kikumura's 30-year sentence was motivated by his political activism. As part
of her support for those she saw as political prisoners, Kochiyama visited in prison Marilyn Buck, a feminist poet, who was
imprisoned for her participation in the 1979 prison escape of Assata Shakur, the 1981 Brink's robbery and the 1983 U.S. Senate
bombing.

Opinion following 9/11

In response to the United States' actions following the September 11 attacks in 2001, Kochiyama stated that "the goal of the war [on
terrorism] is more than just getting oil and fuel. The United States is intent on taking over the world" and "it's important we all
understand that the main terrorist and the main enemy of the world's people is the U.S. government. Racism has been a weakness of
this country from its beginning. Throughout history, all people of color, and all people who don't see eye-to-eye with the U.S.
government have been subject to American terror."

In 2003, while being interviewed by Tamara Kil Ja Kim Nopper in The Objector, Kochiyama said "... I consider Osama bin Laden as one
of the people that I admire. To me, he is in the category of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, all leaders that
I admire ... [who] had severe dislike for the US government and those who held power in the US. I think all of them felt the US
government and its spokesmen were all arrogant, racist, hypocritical, self-righteous, and power hungry..... You asked, 'Should
freedom fighters support him?' Freedom fighters all over the world, and not just in the Muslim world, don’t just support him; they
revere him; they join him in battle. He is no ordinary leader or an ordinary Muslim."

In the same interview with The Objector, she thanked Islam for Osama bin Laden and his actions against the United States, stating,
"..when I think what the US military is doing, brazenly bombing country after country, to take oil resources, bringing about coups,
assassinating leaders of other countries, and pitting neighbor nations against each other, and demonizing anyone who disagrees with
US policy, and detaining and deporting countless immigrants from all over the world, I thank Islam for bin Laden. America’s greed,
aggressiveness, and self-righteous arrogance must be stopped. War and weaponry must be abolished."