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NY Times, June 5 2014
Yuri Kochiyama, Rights Activist Who Befriended Malcolm X, Dies at 93
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Yuri Kochiyama, a civil rights activist who formed an unlikely
friendship with Malcolm X when he was still promoting black nationalism
and later cradled his head in her hands as he lay dying from gunshot
wounds in 1965, died on Sunday in Berkeley, Calif. She was 93.
Her granddaughter Akemi Kochiyama confirmed the death.
Mrs. Kochiyama, the child of Japanese immigrants who settled in Southern
California, knew discrimination well by the time she was a young woman.
During World War II she spent two years in an internment camp for
Japanese-Americans in Arkansas, a searing experience that also exposed
her to the racism of the Jim Crow South.
A few years after the war, she married William Kochiyama, whom she had
met at the camp, and the couple moved to New York in 1948. They spent 12
years in public housing in Manhattan, in the Amsterdam Houses on the
Upper West Side, where most of their neighbors were black and Puerto
Rican, before moving to Harlem.
The couple had become active in the civil rights movement when Mrs.
Kochiyama met Malcolm X for the first time at a Brooklyn courthouse in
October 1963. He was surrounded by supporters, mostly young black men,
when she approached him. She told him she wanted to shake his hand, to
congratulate him, she recalled in an interview with The New York Times
in 1996.
“I admire what you’re doing,” she told him, “but I disagree with some of
your thoughts.”
He asked which ones.
“Your harsh stand on integration,” she said.
He agreed to meet with her later, and by 1964 Mrs. Kochiyama and her
husband had befriended him. Early that year Malcolm X began moving away
from the militant Nation of Islam, to which he belonged, toward beliefs
that were accepting of many kinds of people. He sent the Kochiyamas
postcards from his travels to Africa and elsewhere.
One, mailed from Kuwait on Sept. 27, 1964, read: “Still trying to travel
and broaden my scope since I’ve learned what a mess can be made by
narrow-minded people. Bro. Malcolm X.”
The following February, Mrs. Kochiyama was in the audience at the
Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan waiting
to hear Malcolm X address a new group he had founded, the Organization
of Afro-American Unity, when there was a burst of gunfire. She ran
toward the stage.
“I just went straight to Malcolm, and I put his head on my lap,” she
recalled. “He just lay there. He had difficulty breathing, and he didn’t
utter a word.”
A powerful photograph of her holding him accompanied an article about
the assassination in the March 5, 1965, issue of Life magazine.
Mrs. Kochiyama was born Mary Yuriko Nakahara on May 19, 1921, in San
Pedro, Calif. An outgoing student in high school, she played sports and
wrote for the school newspaper. She said in interviews that she was
mostly unaware of political issues until her father, Seiichi, was taken
into custody by the F.B.I. shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl
Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Although ill, Mr. Nakahara, a successful fish merchant, was held and
interrogated for several weeks before being released on Jan. 20, 1942.
He died the next day. By the spring, the rest of the family was among
the 120,000 Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps across the country.
In the 1980s, the Kochiyamas sought government reparations for
Japanese-Americans who had been interned. In 1988, Congress approved a
plan to pay $20,000 to each of the estimated 60,000 surviving internees.
Besides her granddaughter Akemi, her survivors include a daughter, Audee
Kochiyama-Holman; three sons, Eddie, Jimmy and Tommy; eight other
grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Another son, Billy, died in
the 1970s, and a daughter, Aichi, died in 1989.
Her husband died in 1993. He had been interned in Arkansas before he
joined the all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which became one
of the most decorated units in American military history.
In the 1960s and ’70s, the sofa in the Kochiyamas’ apartment was
regularly occupied by activists in need of a place to sleep. Years
later, Mrs. Kochiyama helped organize campaigns to free activists and
others whom she believed had been wrongly imprisoned, including Mumia
Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and radio journalist sentenced to
death in the killing of a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. In 2012,
his sentence was reduced to life without parole.
Mrs. Kochiyama, who never graduated from college, read constantly and
widely. On Tuesday, her granddaughter Akemi opened for the first time a
journal of favorite quotations that Mrs. Kochiyama had collected and
given to her several years ago.
“There were so many different writers and thinkers,” said Akemi
Kochiyama, who is pursuing a doctorate in cultural anthropology. “It’s
Emerson, it’s Keats and Yeats and José Marti. It’s political thinkers.
It’s Marcus Garvey. It’s everything.”
Mrs. Kochiyama was an inspiration herself. For its 2011 album
“Cinemetropolis,” the Seattle hip-hop group Blue Scholars composed a
song about her. The refrain: “When I grow up I want to be just like Yuri
Kochiyama.”
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