Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama was born in 1921 as Mary Yuriko Nakahara, She spent the early years of her life in San Pedro, Calif., a small town south of Los Angeles. Months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she and her family were forced to relocate to internment camps along with tens of thousands of other Japanese-Americans. She met her late husband, Bill Kochiyama, who served with other Japanese-American soldiers in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, at the Jerome Relocation Center in Arkansas, where she spent two years. The couple married after World War II and moved to start their family in New York City. Living in housing projects among black and Puerto Rican neighbors inspired Yuri’s interest in the civil rights movement. She held weekly open houses for activists in the family’s apartment, where she taped newspaper clippings to the walls and kept piles of leaflets on the kitchen table. “Our house felt like it was the movement 24/7,” said her eldest daughter, Audee Kochiyama-Holman.

Her brief but formative friendship with Malcom X (which began in 1963), helped radicalize her activism. Yuri began focusing her work on black nationalism and was with Malcolm X during his final moments. Minutes after gunmen fired at Malcolm X in 1965 during his last speech in New York City, she rushed toward him and cradled his head on her lap.

In the 1980s, Yuri and her husband pushed for reparations and a formal government apology for Japanese-American internees through the Civil Liberties Act, which President Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1988. This lifelong champion of civil rights causes in the black, Latino, Native American and Asian-American communities inspired younger generations of activists, especially within the Asian-American community. Yuri died peacefully in her sleep in 2014, at the age of 93.

Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Kochiyama