News Clipping: U-M to honor crusader
By Ariana E. Cha
Free Press Staff Writer
The famous photo from Life magazine is frayed after so many years. Yuri Kochiyama keeps it tucked away in a scrapbook in her Harlem apartment.
She doesn’t need to look at it to remember, vividly, that day 32 years ago when she knelt to cradle in her lap the head of her dying friend and hero, Malcolm X, who was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
“It was chaos,” said Kochiyama, a Japanese-American civil rights activist. “Everything happened so fast. I ran right up to him and hoped he would make it.”
In the years since a photographer immortalized the image of an idealistic woman, Kochiyama has become a symbol in her own right. Now 75, she remains a tireless builder of bridges between people, still brimming with passion for equality and justice that drew her to Malcolm X’s cause and to human rights battles all over the world.
“Most of us who were involved have retired and given up,” said Harold Cruse, 78, professor emeritus of history and Afroamerican studies at the University of Michigan. “But she’ll be active until she dies. That’s just the way Mary is.”
Kochiyama is still known to old friends as Mary, the name she went by when Cruse met her in the 1960s. At the time, she was active in Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Young Lords, a militant Puerto Rian civil rights group. She also was among the leading campaigners for reparations for Japanese Americans who, like herself, were locked in internment camps during World War II.
In recent years, Kochiyama has become a familiar face to pedestrians on Harlem’s main street, 125th, where she spends most of her days rallying passers-by to join her latest crusades, to free a former Black Panther and a Chinese national she considers political prisoners in the United States.
A former college teacher in Asian-American studies, Kochiyama frequents college campuses on the
[Please see KOCHIYAMA, Page 6B]
Yuri Kochiyama
Age: 75
Residence: Harlem in New York City.
Education: Associate’s degree, Compton Junior College in Los Angeles.
Occupation: Civil rights activist. Leader in the movement to obtain reparations for Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Taught an Asian-American studies course at City College in New York City and is a regular lecturer at other colleges in New York.
Personal: Widowed. Six children and eight grandchildren.
Background: Only daughter of an immigrant fisherman from Japan. One sibling, a twin brother, who died last year. Raised in San Pedro, Calif.
Quote: “I don’t think there will ever be a time when people will stop wanting to bring about change.”