R.I.P Yuri Kochiyama I will memorial her fought to the last breath for human rights The couple had become active in the civil rights movement when Mrs. Kochiyama met Malcolm X for the first time at a Brooklyn courthouse in October 1963. He was surrounded by supporters, mostly young black men, when she approached him. She told him she wanted to shake his hand, to congratulate him, she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1996. “I admire what you’re doing,” she told him, “but I disagree with some of your thoughts.” He asked which ones. “Your harsh stand on integration,” she said. He agreed to meet with her later, and by 1964 Mrs. Kochiyama and her husband had befriended him. Early that year Malcolm X began moving away from the militant Nation of Islam, to which he belonged, toward beliefs that were accepting of many kinds of people. He sent the Kochiyamas postcards from his travels to Africa and elsewhere. One, mailed from Kuwait on Sept. 27, 1964, read: “Still trying to travel and broaden my scope since I’ve learned what a mess can be made by narrow-minded people. Bro. Malcolm X.” The following February, Mrs. Kochiyama was in the audience at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan waiting to hear Malcolm X address a new group he had founded, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, when there was a burst of gunfire. She ran toward the stage. “I just went straight to Malcolm, and I put his head on my lap,” she recalled. “He just lay there. He had difficulty breathing, and he didn’t utter a word.” A powerful photograph of her holding him accompanied an article about the assassination in the March 5, 1965, issue of Life magazine. nytimes/2014/06/05/us/yuri-kochiyama-civil-rights-activist-dies-at-93.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar&_r=0
Posted on: Thu, 19 Jun 2014 01:24:22 +0000
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