In 1963 Kochiyama was among several hundred people detained at a protest over discriminatory hiring practices. There were always fliers, papers, magazine articles all over it.” “There was a kitchen table, but you couldn’t ever really eat on it. “There was not a lot of privacy.”įurutani recalled that the apartment was so cramped Kochiyama used an ironing board for a desk. “People were in and out of our place 24/7,” said her daughter, Audee Kochiyama Holman. Kochiyama’s apartment became Grand Central for the left. “She said, ‘Are you connected with any groups?’ That was my entrance into the Asian American movement.” “She was a border crosser,” said Los Angeles actress-activist Nobuko Miyamoto, who met her around 1970 at a gathering of the Puerto Rican nationalist group Young Lords. Soon Kochiyama was meeting with radicals of various stripes. As the ‘60s dawned, they relocated to an apartment in Harlem and enrolled in “freedom schools” to learn about black history and culture. Married in 1946, she and her husband moved into a housing project behind Lincoln Center in New York City. That is where she met Bill Kochiyama, a member of the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team made up almost entirely of Japanese American soldiers. She was released in 1944 to help run a USO center for the soldiers in Hattiesburg, Miss. Yuri and the rest of the family were sent to an internment camp in Jerome, Ark., where she organized other young women to write letters to the thousands of Japanese American GIs who were serving their country during the war. Although he had just undergone ulcer surgery, he was denied medical care in prison and died six weeks later. He was among hundreds of people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, who were unjustly accused of espionage and sent to prison after the bombing at Pearl Harbor. That day she was at home with her father when FBI agents knocked on their door and arrested him. She went on to study journalism at Compton Community College.īeing of Japanese descent never seemed to be a problem - until Dec. She was believed to be the first girl elected to the student council at San Pedro High School, wrote a sports column for the San Pedro News-Pilot and was a Sunday school teacher at the local Presbyterian church. At the same time, she took care of the house and children.” Fujino, who wrote a biography of Kochiyama in 2005. Her mother, Tsuyako, “was a bit unusual,” said UC Santa Barbara professor Diane C. Her father, Seiichi, owned a fish and marine supply business and was prominent in the Japanese American community. She was born Mary Yuriko Nakahara in San Pedro on May 19, 1921. ![]() “She was an icon, and icon is not an overstatement.” “She was part of a very unique group of Nisei - primarily women - who were progressive activists … left of liberal,” former state Assemblyman Warren Furutani said Tuesday. ![]() Known as “Sister Yuri” in a wide circle of African American activists that included the firebrand poet Amiri Baraka and ‘60s radical Angela Davis, Kochiyama also became an advocate for prisoners, organizing supporters across racial lines to press for reconsideration of charges many considered politically motivated.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |