User:Vanuliarya/Yuri Kochiyama

Activist life[edit]

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"The Violent End of the Man Called Malcolm", LIFE, March 5, 1965. Photo of Kochiyama cradling the dying Malcolm X's head.

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 capturing that moment. Kochiyama also had close relationships with many other revolutionary nationalist leaders including Robert F. Williams who gave Kochiyama her first copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. Kochiyama became a mentor to the radical end of the Asian American movement that grew during and after the Vietnam War protests. As organizers of East Coast Japanese Americans for Redress and Reparations, Yuri and Bill advocated for reparations and a government apology for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and spearheaded the campaign to bring the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to New York. Additionally, Kochiyama founded the Day of Remembrance Committee in New York City to commemorate the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066, which caused the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 which, among other things, awarded $20,000 to each Japanese American internment survivor. Kochiyama used this victory to advocate for reparations for African Americans. In later years, Kochiyama was active in opposing profiling of and bigotry against Muslims, Middle Easterners, and South Asians in the United States, a phenomenon she viewed 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.

Kochiyama also taught English to immigrant students and volunteered at soup kitchens and homeless shelters in New York City. In Debbie Allen's television series Cool Women (2001), Kochiyama stated, "The legacy I would like to leave is that people try to build bridges and not walls."

Advocacy[edit]

Kochiyama has been described as a woman of "complicated political beliefs" and at times "contradictory views" who managed to combine support for both racial integration and separation. She admired Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh.

Kochiyama supported the Peruvian Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path. She joined a delegation to Peru, organized by the American Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, to gather support for Abimael Guzmán, the imprisoned leader of the Shining Path. Kochiyama stated "[t]he more I read, the more I came to completely support the revolution in Peru."

Kochiyama in the mid-1960s joined the Revolutionary Action Movement, a black nationalist organization dedicated to urban guerrilla warfare which was one of the first organizations in the black liberation movement to attempt to construct an ideology based on a synthesis of the thought of Malcolm X, Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong. In 1968 she was one of the few non-blacks invited to join the Republic of New Africa which advocated the establishment of a separate black nation in the Southern United States. 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. After Kochiyama became a "citizen" of the RNA she decided to drop her "slave name" Mary and used only the name Yuri.

Kochiyama founded and sustained the David Wong Support Committee, which after a fourteen-year battle succeeded in exonerating Wong of the murder of a fellow inmate. Kochiyama wrote letters to, fundraised for, and visited Wong in prison.

Kochiyama supported people she saw as political prisoners and victims of FBI oppression. 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. She was a friend and supporter of Assata Shakur, an African-American activist and member of the former Black Liberation Army (BLA), who had been convicted of 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]." She also supported Marilyn Buck, a feminist poet, who was imprisoned for her participation in Shakur's 1979 prison escape, the 1981 Brink's robbery and the 1983 U.S. Senate bombing. Yuri was also in correspondence with Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, her first teacher in the Republic of New Africa's (RNA) Nation Building class, for six years while he was imprisoned.

In 1977, Kochiyama joined a group of Puerto Ricans who took over the Statue of Liberty to draw attention to the movement 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. The nationalists occupied the statue for nine hours before giving up peacefully when the police moved in. President Carter pardoned the attempted assassins in 1979.

Kochiyama also supported Yū 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.