Yuri Kochiyama's charge to the next generation, to make sure power is never used abusively but always to build trust and goodwill at home and abroad, and her reminder that tomorrow's world is theirs to build, comes from a woman who spent seventy years building solidarity across every line meant to divide oppressed peoples. 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. Her family was among the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans forced into US concentration camps, first at the Santa Anita racetrack and then at Jerome, Arkansas. There she saw the parallels between her people's treatment and the Jim Crow oppression of Black Southerners.

In 1960 she moved to Harlem with her husband, Bill, and their family, and she threw herself into the Black freedom movement. She met Malcolm X in 1963, became his close comrade, and joined his Organization of Afro-American Unity. She was at the Audubon Ballroom when he was assassinated in 1965, and she cradled his head as he died. For the rest of her life she fought for political prisoners, for Puerto Rican independence, and for Black liberation. She joined the 1977 occupation of the Statue of Liberty demanding freedom for Puerto Rican nationalist prisoners, and she helped lead the movement that won redress for Japanese Americans incarcerated during the war.

Kochiyama understood that the liberation of each people is bound up with the liberation of all. Her vision of power was not domination but the collective strength to build a just world, used with accountability to the people and in solidarity with oppressed peoples everywhere. She died in Berkeley in 2014. Her words remain a challenge to every generation of organizers: to take up the work, to build movements worthy of the world we are fighting for, and to remember that the future is ours to make.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*