They erased her father. They erased Malcolm X. But they couldn’t erase her.
May 19, 1921: Yuri Kochiyama, an American civil rights activist, was born Mary Yuriko Nakahara in San Pedro, California.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Yuri Kochiyama’s family was among the first targeted. Her father, a respected community figure, was taken by the FBI the very next day.
He had just returned from the hospital. He was diabetic, recovering from surgery. He was not a threat. He was a father, a U.S. citizen, a man trying to heal.
The military held him without charges. He was interrogated. He was denied proper care. By the time they returned him, it was too late.
He died the next day.
That was her first encounter with the government’s idea of “justice.” It would not be her last.
Yuri and her family were soon incarcerated at Jerome, Arkansas, one of ten concentration camps used to imprison Japanese Americans.
But even after the fences came down, she never forgot. She never sat quietly. And she never stopped asking questions.
In the 1960s, she moved to Harlem and joined the Black liberation movement. She became close friends with Malcolm X, and was with him when he was assassinated in 1965.
She cradled his head in her arms as he died.
Over the decades, she fought for political prisoners, reparations, Puerto Rican independence, Black self-determination, and an honest reckoning with America’s history of imperialism and racial violence.
Her activism was complex, intersectional, and, at times, controversial.
But it was never quiet.
They erased her father. They erased Malcolm X. But they couldn’t erase Yuri Kochiyama.
We won’t either.
