Yuri Kochiyama and the Life of an Activist Archive
Yuri Kochiyama’s archival and organizing practices were informed by her experience under incarceration during World War II.¹ She told her biographer, Diane Fujino: “I can never forget what we, peoples of Japanese ancestry, experienced during World War II because of hysteria, isolation, and absolutely no support…Yes we were also political prisoners.”¹ Indeed, the incarceration of 100,000 Japanese Americans shaped the “grammar” of counterinsurgency. Beginning in the 19th century, and entrenching during World War II, the Asian continent has emerged as a “double front” of “threat” and “encroachment” for the United States.¹ In World War II, under a wartime “emergency,” the federal government justified the incarceration of its own citizens, forcibly removing Japanese Americans from their homes and placing them in concentration camps for nearly three years. In the years that followed, following U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and the Chinese Communist Revolution, the federal government, press, and public continued to suspect recent Asian immigrants and Asian Americans of dissident political activity.
While she recognized the unjustness of her incarceration, it was not until Kochiyama relocated to Harlem with her husband Bill in 1960 that she began her political transformation into an activist and understood her experience as the product of racism.¹ In the context of vibrant Black organizing in Harlem, she began to formulate her analysis of racism and bore direct witness to the federal government’s war on terror on organizers in her community. In the following twenty years, she filled boxes to the brim in her apartment with her own painstaking notes, phone numbers, meeting minutes, and case information, ready to serve as a messenger, legal defender, and movement archive at a moment’s notice.¹
Kochiyama first met the prominent Black revolutionary Malcolm X on October 16, 1963 at a courthouse in Brooklyn, as part of a campaign against the discriminatory hiring of construction workers.¹ Despite her popular association with Malcolm X, Kochiyama had only known him for 16 months before his assassination. However, their encounters transformed the trajectory of her activism. Malcolm challenged Kochiyama’s beliefs in liberal reform, integrationism, and nonviolence, while Kochiyama invited Malcolm to support Japanese Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors).¹
Shortly after his break from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, alongside John Henrik Clarke and other Black nationalist leaders, founded the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU).¹ At one of his talks, Malcolm invited Kochiyama to the OAAU’s Liberation School at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. Every Saturday morning between November 1964 to April 1965, when the school closed, Kochiyama took meticulous notes on talks about the history of imperialism in Africa and slavery, as well as the Black freedom struggle in the United States. Her time surrounded by the Black liberation movement challenged her liberal beliefs and led her to embrace revolutionary nationalism and radical anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, and antiracism. Today, Kochiyama is considered a founding member of the OAAU.
Kochiyama was a key steward of Malcolm X’s legacy after his assassination in 1965. Along with her husband Bill, Kochiyama published newsletters featuring original writing, photographs, and artwork, including their newsletter The North Star. In the newsletter, Kochiyama described her admiration for Malcolm: “Triumphantly illuminating today’s stark atmosphere, giving light and direction, invincible and inextinguishable, Malcolm is that North Star shining.” The publication allowed Kochiyama to consider Malcolm’s legacy. She wrote broadly about Black revolutionary nationalism and self-determination.
In the 1970s, the federal government increasingly targeted activists and expanded the prison system. During this period, legal defense campaigns brought together feminists, Black Power organizers, local community groups, union organizers, church activists, and activists.¹ A notable example is the campaign supporting Angela Davis, who was arrested in 1970 in connection with the murder of a white prison guard by three Black inmates at Soledad Prison.¹ In response, the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis (NUCFAD) exposed the state repression of Black radical organizers.¹ NUCFAD emphasized the ways in which prisons did not solve or deter crimes; rather, they criminalized people and organizations deemed as threats by the federal government.¹
As Kochiyama became more involved across organizations in New York City, where she lived from 1960 to 1999, she quickly discovered that many of her friends and fellow activists had also become government targets. Though Kochiyama did not often take a key leadership role in organizations, significant movement work was supported and made possible by her willingness to open up her home, connect activists across her extensive social network, and keep meticulous notes and records of all her correspondence and classes.
While living in Harlem, Kochiyama and her husband, Bill, opened their door to the movement. Activists, artists, friends, and family poured into their living room for their weekend open houses. Within their Harlem apartment, they conducted workshops, organized demonstrations, folded leaflets, and wrote letters to political prisoners.
Over time, her social network made her an effective emergency contact. Put simply, Kochiyama always knew who to call next, whether it be a lawyer, a friend, a partner, or fellow organizer. Mutulu Shakur of the Black Liberation Army once told Kochiyama’s biographer: “Anybody getting arrested, no matter Black, Puerto Rican, or whatever, our first call was to [Kochiyama’s] number.”¹
Kochiyama was deeply committed to the cause of political prisoners, whom she regarded as the “heartbeat of struggle.”¹ A single box on political prisoners from her personal papers alone contains 95 folders on different cases, prisoners, and defense committees.¹ The case files range in age group, racial background, gender, and geography, encompassing the defense committees of Mumia Abu-Jamal to Chol Soo Lee.
By the 1990s, legal defense campaigns helped more activists understand that prisons did not only harm activists but everyone who found themselves behind bars. Abolitionist thinkers and activists today argue that prisons are an instrument of oppression, harming people across multiple intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and nationality.¹
In 1969, following the Third World Liberation Strike at San Francisco State University, the City College of New York (CCNY) established an ethnic studies program.¹ However, the Asian studies curriculum lacked a specific program on Asian American-centered courses. In 1972, a group of Black, Puerto Rican, and Chinese American students occupied Goethals Hall to demand a more community-centered curriculum and faculty positions. Through the pan-Asian multi-generational coalition in New York City, Asian Americans for Action, students at the City College of New York (CCNY) invited Kochiyama to speak at their demonstration.
After the occupation, which successfully won several faculty positions and Asian American studies courses, Kochiyama was among the first to teach a course in Asian American studies at CCNY. Her course “Social Science Approach to Asia” taught the recent history of American imperialist incursions in Asia, from the Vietnam War to the imposition of U.S. military bases in Japan and the Philippines. As she once told a rally, “Ethnic studies is an important vehicle. It can become a creative, action-oriented, dynamic apparatus for the community, or a stilted, ivory towered institution.”
Kochiyama was eager to share her wisdom with Asian American student organizations. This newsletter was founded to provide a forum of expression for Asian American students at Yale and the greater New Haven community. They reprinted articles from other Asian American newspapers such as Gidra, Pacific Citizen, and East-West.
This pamphlet features the address made by Dr. Grace Lee Boggs at the Asian American Reality Conference held at Pace College in New York City, December 5, 1970 and was reproduced by Asian Americans for Action in New York City in 1973.
Kochiyama embodied the conviction that all liberation movements are united in the struggle against racism, imperialism, and colonialism. In 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War, she began to draw connections between Black liberation movements to various anti-colonial upheavals across the Third World. “The realization of self-determination is electrifying,” she wrote in a newsletter for the anti-war group Asian Americans for Action. “Thus, the cause of Palestine is that of Vietnam’s; the liberation struggles of Mozambique and Angola are related to the guerillas’ involvement in Uruguay and Bolivia.”
In the 1970s, Kochiyama was invited to be one of the few non-Black citizens of the newly formed Republic of New Africa (RNA) and later participated in the Puerto Rican-led takeover of the Statue of Liberty to demand the release of five political prisoners.¹
The primary sources in this exhibit comprise what we may understand as the result of Kochiyama’s archival practice. The materials preserve alternative histories of injustice and struggle, chronicle old and ongoing debates over ideology and strategy, and continue to inform political organizing. They represent the kind of powerful coalition building across racial groups, national borders, cultures, and languages that achieves meaningful social change – and the political horizon that is still within reach. “We must all work to break down the barriers and phobias and build working relations,” Kochiyama said during a roundtable on African-Asian relations in 1997, “while understanding that each group has its own primary issues and needs its own privacy and leadership.”
Owing her foundational political education to the Black liberation movement, Kochiyama was passionate about sharing the history of interactions between Africans and Asians, and Black and Asian Americans. In an interview with her biographer Diane Fujino, Kochiyama expressed: “One of the greatest lessons Malcolm taught people was to learn their own history… But don’t stop there. Learn about the histories of other people. And learn about the histories of social movements because this is how you learn to create social change.” As she joined the burgeoning East Coast Asian American movement in the late 1960s, her internationalist stance continued to evolve as she further connected the issues of the civil rights movement and Black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, and Native American self-determination to the struggles of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-Tung, and Madame Binh in Asia.
Nothing better conveys Yuri Kochiyama’s political commitment than a glance at her pocket calendar. Almost every day of her life in these years was filled with some form of contribution to one of the many political movements that shaped her career as an activist.
“Life is not alone what you make it,” she wrote in the preface of her 2004 memoir Passing It On. “Life is the input of everyone who touched your life and every experience that entered it. We are all a part of one another.” In this vein, this exhibit considers the worlds that touched the life and activism of Yuri Kochiyama, and the worlds she helped shape.
"A Revolutionary Friendship: Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama." Panel at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, February 19, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/live/LCkseNUk0ls?si=8BeHnaiUW8O3Hzkl
Davis, Angela Y. and Gina Dent. Abolition, Feminism, Now. Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2022.
Edwards, Erica R. “The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire.” In The Other Side of Terror. New York University Press, 2021.
Fujino, Diane Carol. Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama, Critical American Studies Series. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
— "Grassroots Leadership and Afro-Asian Solidarities: Yuri Kochiyama’s Humanizing Radicalism." In Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, eds. Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard. New York University Press, 2009.
Gore, Dayo F. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York University Press, 2010.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Duke University Press, 1996.
Nguyen, Martin. "When Malcolm Visited Yuri." Between Revelation and the World, February 6, 2025. https://martinnguyen.substack.com/p/when-malcolm-visited-yuri
Rodriguez, Dylan. Review of Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama by Diane C. Fujino and Passing It On—A Memoir by Yuri Kochiyama. Amerasia Journal 34, no. 2 (2008): 164-168.
Rovira, Carlos. "Remember the October 25, 1977 Puerto Rican takeover of the STATUE OF LIBERTY." carlitoboricua, October 17, 2024. https://carlitoboricua.blog/2024/10/17/remember-the-october-251977-puer…
Seidman, Sarah. "Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X." Museum of the City of New York Blog, February 22, 2022. https://www.mcny.org/story/malcolmx-and-yuri-kochiyama
Umemoto, Karen. “‘On Strike!’: San Francisco State College Strike, 1968–1969: The Role of Asian American Students.” Contemporary Asian America (Third Edition): A Multidisciplinary Reader, edited by Min Zhou and Anthony C. Ocampo, NYU Press, 2016, pp. 25–59. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18040wj.8. Accessed 15 May 2026.
X, Malcolm. "Speech at the OAAU Founding Rally." Speech, Harlem, NY, June 28, 1964. ICIT Digital Library. https://www.icit-digital.org/articles/malcolm-x-s-speech-at-the-oaau-fo…