Yuri Kochiyama was a Japanese American revolutionary, organizer, and internationalist who spent more than half a century building solidarity among oppressed peoples and fighting for political prisoners. She was born Mary Yuriko Nakahara in San Pedro, California, in 1921. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested her father, who died shortly after his release, and her family was among the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans forced into US concentration camps. Imprisoned at Jerome, Arkansas, she witnessed the Jim Crow segregation of the surrounding South and began to see the connections between her own people's oppression and that of Black Americans.

In 1960 she moved to Harlem with her husband, Bill, and their children, and their apartment became a gathering place for activists of every background. She organized with the Harlem Parents Committee for safer schools and jobs and was arrested protesting discrimination in construction. In 1963 she met Malcolm X, and she became his close comrade and a member of his Organization of Afro-American Unity, studying in its Liberation School. She was at the Audubon Ballroom when he was assassinated in 1965, and she cradled his head as he died. In the years that followed she joined the Republic of New Afrika, opposed the war in Vietnam, and helped build the Asian American movement, linking it to the struggles of Black, Puerto Rican, and Indigenous peoples.

Kochiyama devoted much of her life to political prisoners, writing letters, visiting prisons, and organizing for the freedom of Black, Puerto Rican, and Indigenous revolutionaries held by the state. In 1977 she joined the occupation of the Statue of Liberty demanding the release of Puerto Rican nationalist prisoners, and she helped lead the movement that won redress for Japanese Americans incarcerated during the war. She died in Berkeley in 2014 at the age of ninety-three. Her legacy endures as a model of revolutionary solidarity, the conviction that no people can be free until all oppressed peoples are free.