Counterclockwise

from bottom right: Yuri Kochiyama (sitting), poet-activist Mitsuye

Yamada, Diane Fujino, and her sons Seku and Kano at an Interfaith Prisoners of

Conscience Project (IPOC) meeting in San Francisco, November 2005. Photo

by Matef Harmachis.

"If

there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom

and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground."







--Frederick Douglass, 1857

For me, Yuri’s

passing has been harder than expected. After all, she had lived a long and extraordinary life and had been in

poor health. But only after she

transitioned did it really hit me. She’s

been a core part of my life for 20 years and was my foremost political mentor. The

loss of an elder -- one who has gained wisdom from the experiences of life, who

made the individual as important as the collective, and who used her life in service

to justice -- creates a huge void in our shared communities.

For our Asian American community, the loss is

all the greater because we have so few visible activist leaders. Now I fear that all her complexity as a

person and an activist-leader is being reduced to two images: the internment camps and that now famous photo of her holding Malcolm X at the time of his

assassination. It’s like Martin frozen

in time in 1963 or Malcolm on an X cap.

When that photo

was first published in 1965, Life magazine

neither named nor recognized the Asian woman cradling the slain Malcolm X. But following her death, Life reprinted the photo and named Yuri Kochiyama in its brief

coverage. This is symbolic of the ways the

Asian American freedom movements and activists have been dangerously

misunderstood. First, we’re rendered

invisible. Second, when discussed, Asian

American radicalism is made into something it never was -- moderate and

nonthreatening. The general public and

most of the Asian American community as well have never heard of Yuri

Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, Richard Aoki, Fred Ho, the Asian American Political

Alliance, Asian Americans for Action, I Wor Kuen, Wei Min She, KDP, or Gidra, much less understand these nuanced

histories.

So the telling of Yuri’s

story becomes more important than ever. I’m grateful to have been able to write her biography, Heartbeat of Struggle. I'm also fortunate to have read the many articles and interviews by and about Yuri, including her memoir, Passing It On, as well as viewed the two

documentaries about her life, Passion for Justice

and Mountains that Take Wing. Together these works tell

a more complicated story of struggle, of human foibles, and of an ordinary

person creating an extraordinary life.

Yuri was not

afraid to learn about and stand by the most radical visions of a transformed

and egalitarian society. In October

1963, when Yuri first met Malcolm X, she was a middle-aged mother of six who opposed

his views on integration -- and told him so. But she was willing to listen and learn from him and others whose life

experiences differed from her own. With an

unsurprising intensity but surprising ease, she immersed herself in Malcolm’s

world and soon adopted the politics of national liberation, of struggles for land

rights, and of self-determination and self-defense.

In the late 1960s, she joined the Republic of

New Africa. She fiercely defended

political prisoners. She supported

Puerto Rican activists fighting for national independence. She visited and defended socialist Cuba and traveled

to Peru as part of a delegation to defend the imprisoned leader of Shining

Path, the country’s Communist Party. She

called for Black reparations alongside Japanese American redress. And she condemned US and Japanese imperialism

from Hiroshima and Okinawa, to Vietnam and Hawai’i. Yuri believed as Frantz Fanon did in The Wretched of the Earth: “For a colonized people, the most essential

value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the

land, which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity.”

Yuri saw ordinary

people as catalysts of change. And she

trusted people to a flaw. But strength

and weakness are flip sides of the same coin. The first time I interviewed Yuri in December 1995, Yuri handed me a key

to her apartment so I wouldn’t have to wait in the snow in case she returned

late from her meeting. I barely knew

Yuri and refused her offer. Yuri’s

family and fellow activists have worried that her openness increased her

vulnerability to predatory people or infiltration. But in today’s climate of heightened fears

about personal and national security, of orange alerts and text messages about

every single neighborhood crime, Yuri’s faith in ordinary people’s capacity to

make decisions, to learn and grow from their mistakes, and to collectively

change society is more relevant than ever and essential for movement

building.

This trust in

people coincided with Yuri’s belief in a model of collective leadership that borrowed

from the traditions of Ella Baker and became a hallmark of the Asian American Movement. She disrupted the conventional notions

of leadership by embodying a “centerperson” style, a concept developed from

Karen Sacks and contained in my essay on Yuri in Want to Start a Revolution?

While

Yuri exemplified traditional leadership through her writings and speeches, her

strength as a leader was as a networker and bridge builder. By bringing people together, she introduced

people to activist struggles, provoked new analyses of social conditions,

challenged conventional thinking, got people excited about activism, crossed

borders of differences, and ultimately helped to build multiple social

movements.

Her home, dubbed “Grand Central Station,” was

a non-stop flow of people and meetings. In

a time before the internet or even answering machines, people would leave

messages and leaflets with Yuri to disseminate as she waitressed in

working-class restaurants. Numerous newly

released prisoners saw Yuri’s as the first number to call when they got out of

prison. She attended to the individual, inquiring

about one’s life, offering food, and asking people to write to political

prisoners on their birthdays. These

qualities are too often dismissed. But

if one believes as Yuri did that the people give power to the movement, then

the kind of centerperson practices that Yuri embodied are crucial leadership

qualities.

One way to honor

Yuri is to take seriously her philosophies and practices. This doesn’t mean agreeing with everything --

but rather taking the time to study, to be open to unconventional, even

transgressive, ideas -- and to transform oneself and possibly society in the

struggles for justice. Yuri believed as

Fredrick Douglass did that progress requires struggle and that agitation is

necessary for those who believe in freedom.

At the end of her

life, while in failing health, Yuri offered momentary glimpses into the

concerns on her mind. Nobuko Miyamoto,

who worked with Yuri in the New York Asian and Black movements, relayed how

during a recent visit, Yuri sprung to life at the mention of Mutulu Shakur’s

upcoming parole. She insisted, “We

have to get everyone together…we have to help Mutulu.” She momentarily woke from sleep, looked Wayie

Ly in the eyes and said, "The Asian American Movement is so far behind... we

have to catch up with all the other groups...." It is up to us, as a

multi-generational movement, to understand the lessons in Yuri’s story and to

figure out how to collectively create that transformed society.

I thank you, Yuri,

for your fearlessness and determination in the protracted struggle, for demanding

that we treat people with dignity, and for bringing great joy and meaning to my

life.

***

Diane C. Fujino is author of Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama, as

well as books on Richard Aoki (Samurai

among Panthers) and Fred Ho (as editor, Wicked

Theory, Naked Practice) and numerous essays on Asian American radicalism

and Afro-Asian solidarities. She is

Professor of Asian American Studies and Director of the Center for Black

Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Inspired by Yuri, she’s a longtime activist

in the political prisoner, anti-war, public education, and Asian American

movements.