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THE BRIDGES YURI BUILT by Kai Naima Williams

THE BRIDGES YURI BUILT

How Yuri Kochiyama Marched Across Movements

by Kai Naima Williams ; illustrated by Anastasia Magloire Williams

Pub Date: April 2nd, 2024
ISBN: 9781960571007
Publisher: Kaepernick Publishing

A celebration of the life and legacy of a Japanese American Civil Rights activist.

Rather than directly urge readers to adopt her forebear Yuri Kochiyama as a role model, the author simply relates select experiences in her great-grandmother’s life that turned her into an activist and that portray her in action. Born in California and imprisoned in an Arkansas incarceration camp during World War II, Yuri formed a group of correspondents to write letters of support to Japanese American soldiers. Facing racial discrimination after the war as well, she then leveraged that organizing experience while quietly working her way into the inner circles of the Civil Rights Movement—she was close enough to Malcolm X to cradle his head in her lap moments after he was shot—and going on to be a freedom fighter, building bridges connecting many social causes. “For Yuri,” the author writes in her afterword, “solidarity was not an ideal but an embodied, necessary practice.” Images of her—a slight figure in owlish eyeglasses, raising a defiant fist, facing a New York shop window with signs reading “No Japs” and “Colored entrance in rear,” waving protest banners, hosting meetings and open houses in her Harlem apartment, and standing here with fellow activists and there alone at her ironing board writing letters—serve to underscore her lifelong energy and dedication.

Eloquent and inspiring.

(Picture-book biography. 7-9)