In her newly released PBS documentary Of the People: Women of the Civil Rights Movement, director Shayla Cox Milan shifts the lens of history away from the singular male icon often associated with historical struggles to the pivotal work performed by oft-ignored women organizers. Among the scholars anchoring her timely narrative is UCSB’s Diane Fujino, a professor of Asian American Studies, whose deep research into the life of Yuri Kochiyama delves into a unique bridge between Black Power and Asian American activism.
The documentary, which first aired on March 1, also highlights the lives and struggles of famed civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta. To tell Kochiyama's story, the film traces her transformation from a self-described apolitical young woman in San Pedro to a radical revolutionary also described by Fujino in her 2005 book Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama as well as Fujino’s chapter on Kochiyama in 2009’s Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. In those works, Fujino recounts how Kochiyama was well assimilated into American life until the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. Her trauma-informed political awakening was the catalyst for a life defined by what Fujino calls "centerperson" skills—the ability to nurture a movement from its heart.
“Yuri Kochiyama teaches us so much about how to be a dedicated movement activist, how to extend care for the people involved in the struggle, whether those in prison or doing the intense work of organizing or those facing racism, poverty, and so many other struggles,” Fujino said. “She and her husband and family opened their home to thousands of people for meetings, social gatherings, and offered a place to stay, always with food.”
A crucial lesson offered by Of the People, said Fujino, is that while Kochiyama worked with the most militant activists, she remained rooted in the capacity of ordinary people to create change. In that sense, Kochiyama’s life serves is a personal North Star for Fujino in her own scholarship and activism. “I carry her with me to work with integrity," she said. "I ask myself, what would Yuri do?"
Kochiyama, who is perhaps most recognized as the woman cradling the head of Malcolm X in the wake of his 1965 assassination at New York’s Audubon Ballroom, is often misunderstood, Fujino added. “She was a justice-based activist, but she was also much more. She studied and learned and transformed into a person willing to critique systems of oppression. She worked with the most radical and militant activists and always demanded politics of solidarity, where our struggles are intertwined and where we develop the leadership of those most impacted by societal problems.”
"Yuri Kochiyama teaches us so much about how to be a dedicated movement activist," Fujino says. “This is a great documentary to introduce people to tremendously important women organizers in the Asian American, Black and Chicano movements of the 1960s-70s. As Ella Baker or Yuri Kochiyama's lives show, women were doing such important work, often the heavy lifting, but were time and time again overlooked in favor of male leadership. Women's leadership teaches us new ways to be about how to engage prefigurative relationships, the kind of caring and growthful relationships we want to have with one another and need as we build movement for liberation.”
Of the People: Women of the Civil Rights Movement is available via streaming on both PBS and Amazon Prime.