Human rights activist Yuri Kochiyama — one of the most visible Asian Americans to fight alongside Blacks for equality in the 1960s and an ally of Malcolm X who comforted him as he lay dying — has died. She passed away in her sleep Sunday at age 93 in her Berkeley, Calif., home.
Kochiyama is perhaps most famous for cradling Malcolm X’s head in her lap as he died from gunshot wounds in 1965, an image captured in a Life magazine photo. She had been attending his appearance at New York City’s Audubon Ballroom when an assassin shot him, and she rushed to the stage. A Life magazine photo showed her fear.
A University of California, Santa Barbara professor of Asian American studies, Dr. Diane C. Fujino authored a biography titled “Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama.”
In a 2006 interview for Diverse, Fujino noted that “every Black radical and nationalist I’ve met embraces Yuri, and young Asian Americans learn about someone who looks like them, but has worked completely outside the system.”
The daughter of Japanese immigrants, Kochiyama was born Mary Yuriko Nakahara and grew up with her brothers in a White neighborhood in southern California.
But after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, everything changed.
FBI agents arrested Kochiyama’s father in a mass roundup of “suspects” and jailed him based on national security paranoia. He was denied medical care, and, shortly after his release, he died. The rest of the family were among 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens including Kochiyama, who were herded into remote internment camps during World War II. Among other things, the ordeal cost the overwhelming majority of internees their homes, jobs and nearly everything they had owned prior to their imprisonment.
