The Japanese-American Internee Who Met Malcolm X : Code Switch : NPR: The brief friendship of Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama began close to 50 years ago with a handshake.
Diane Fujino, chair of the University of California, Santa Barbara's Asian American studies department, details the moment in October of 1963 in her biography Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama.
Kochiyama and her eldest son, 16-year-old Billy, were arrested during a protest in Brooklyn, N.Y., along with hundreds of others, mainly African Americans."[They were] in this packed courthouse," Fujino says. "[There were] a lot of activists who [were] waiting their hearing on the civil disobedience charges."
And in walks Malcolm X, who was quickly mobbed by adoring activists.
Kochiyama described the scene in a in 2008. "I felt so bad that I wasn't black, that this should be just a black thing," she recalled. "But the more I see them all so happily shaking his hands and Malcolm so happy, I said, 'Gosh, darn it! I'm going to try to meet him somehow.' "
Eventually, Kochiyama called out to Malcolm X, "Can I shake your hand?"
