Is it a coincidence that Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X have the same birthday? I typically don’t believe in them but it’s interesting that the pair who fought together in the Civil Rights Movement have this in common. Highlighted today on Google Doodle, May 19, 2016 would be Kochiyama’s 95th birthday and his 91st.
Over 50 years ago, on February 21, 1955, Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little and also known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, took his last breath. He was delivering a speech when he was gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Riddled with bullets, Kochiyama cradled his head as he lay dying on the stage. The 39-year-old minister’s light was extinguished before her eyes.
After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 (World War II), Kochiyama, a daughter of Japanese immigrants, became an activist. Before they were detained, she and her family lived a traditional Japanese home life in a predominantly white working-class neighborhood. They were forced from their home in San Pedro, California and held in an United States concentration camp along with more than 120,000 Japanese Americans. Her father’s arrest was torturous and he eventually died from lack of medical care. It’s this racism that lit the fire in Kochiyama.
Kochiyama spent six decades championing civil rights, protesting racial inequality and fighting for causes of social justice.
Residents of Harlem, Yuri and her husband Bill Kochiyama, were non-black Black separatists and supporters of the Black Panther party.
A recipient of the 2004 Gustavus Meyers Center, Yuri Kochiyama is the author of “Passing It On”, a memoir, which she wrote as a legacy to her grandchildren in remembrance of their family’s heritage. “To live a life without losing faith in God, my fellowmen, and my country…To love everyone; to never know the meaning of hate, or have one enemy…An enemy, to me, is only created in one’s mind.”
She died of natural cause on June 1, 2014.
