Bridging Liberation

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Welcome to Rediscovering Black and Asian Solidarity Podcast. I am your co-host, Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz.

Judy Yu:
And I'm Dr. Judy Yu.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
You know you're in the right place if you're listening and tuning in because this podcast offers rare conversation on Black and Asian solidarity, history, current approaches, and future potential. We feature well-known activists and everyday people who aspire to build Black and Asian solidarity and solidarity among other communities through their work and creative projects.
Just a little bit about the Black and Asian Solidarity Collective, we are an ever expanding group among Black and Asian people, and we focus on issues of educational justice, cultural memory, as well as anti-racist coalition. Founding members include David Beauzil, Akemi Kochiyama-Ladson, Diana Liu, Vanessa Leung, myself, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, and Judy Yu, among others. For this episode, our very first one, we are joined by scholar activist Akemi Kochiyama. Welcome, Akemi, to the podcast.

Akemi Kochiyama:
Thank you for having me.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
She's a scholar, activist and community builder whose work centers on multicultural coalition and solidarity. Akemi is also the co-director of the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project. She co-edited Passing It On, a memoir by Yuri Kochiyama. She's a graduate of Spelman College and a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. Her grandmother was the legendary activist, Yuri Kochiyama, and Akemi's work builds on her legacy. She focuses on bridging black and Asian liberation, archival memory and coalition building. Akemi, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being our first guest. And Judy's going to kick it off with some great questions.

Judy Yu:
So Akemi, we're so delighted that you are our first guest on our Collective podcast. I wanted to ask you a few questions about how did you get involved in your scholarly activist work? If you could tell us a little bit about your personal and family journey.

Akemi Kochiyama:
Sure. Thank you so much. I guess I was always in close proximity to my grandparents who were community-based activists and human rights activists as well, because my mom was a very busy working mom. She was juggling being an activist and an artist and a working mom. So growing up, my grandparents were my primary babysitters. So I was probably in their house almost every day of my life as a young person, until I was around 30, when my grandmother moved out.
And so because of that, I was always witness to and also assisting and helping whatever was going on in my grandparents' house, whether they were hosting friends or lunch or a fundraiser or a political meeting or Yuri was doing errands in the neighborhood, her daily practice of making copies of leaflets at the copy shop and going to the post office and buying stamps and mailing things. She was always doing mailings, helping her, helping my grandfather shop and prepare for upcoming events, which were 365 days a year in their home. So I think that was a normal part of life, doing that. And so that was very much a part I think of how I grew up, just helping and observing all of these different kinds of gatherings, political, social, cultural, and probably extraordinary level of exposure to culture.

Judy Yu:
So Akemi, can you tell us a little bit about who your grandmother is?

Akemi Kochiyama:
Sure. So Yuri Kochiyama was originally born Yuriko Nakahara. She's from San Pedro, California. She was a second generation Japanese American. We call that Nisei. So her parents were Ise, first generation Japanese Americans. She grew up very all American, patriotic in San Pedro, California. Her father was a commercial fisherman, had a very successful business. She has a twin brother. A lot of people don't know that. She had a twin brother, Pete, very different from her and an older brother, Art. And they lived a very, very typical American life until the bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbor and the Executive Order 9066 happened and her father was actually kidnapped by the FBI, disappeared.
It took them days to find out what happened to him as this happened to many Japanese American business leaders at that time, so they weren't alone in this experience. Just a lot like what's happening today. They literally took him from his bed in his pajamas. He was brought back a couple of weeks later and they hadn't charged him because they had no evidence and he died the next day. And then a couple weeks later they had to move from their beautiful home and were incarcerated for the remainder of the war.
While that experience did not politicize Yuri immediately, it was definitely the beginning of her starting to see, as she would say, America with different eyes. And after camp, she met my grandfather during camp and they fell in love and gotten married immediately after the war and ended up moving to public housing because, like black soldiers, Japanese soldiers did not get the benefits of the GI Bill. They ended up in public housing and they eventually ended up back on 126th Street, where my grandfather, Bill, grew up in the Manhattanville projects, when they opened in 1960. And Yuri would say that that was the big life changing thing that happened.
They moved to Harlem in 1960 and got swept up into everything that happened. And their early initial involvement was with the Harlem Parents Committee and attending the Harlem Freedom Schools that the Harlem Parents Committee began, right there on 126, again, on that same street. And while she began in the civil rights movement very much as an integrationist and a civil rights activist, her experience and exposure and evolving philosophies and then meeting Malcolm X in 1963 and joining the organization of Afro-American Unity really impacted her politics and she became a much broader, in terms of her thinking, she became an anti-imperialist and an internationalist as a result of her interaction with Malcolm X and would spend the rest of her life deeply dedicated to fighting for liberation and justice for really, I think she was involved in all the social justice movements of the second half of the 20th century.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Well, I have to say that I think the first time I became familiar with your grandmother was she was the woman, the sister holding the head of Malcolm as he laid dying in the Audubon Ballroom. And I think that might have been my first introduction to who was this woman, Yuri Kochiyama? And then that led me down the rabbit hole. So some of our listeners may not be or may have heard of her name or maybe heard of her in the way that I was introduced to her, as I learned about Malcolm, then I learned about Yuri and this was the woman holding his head, trying to keep him alive.

Akemi Kochiyama:
Meanwhile, I'm a young person growing up in New York City, in Harlem, black and Japanese with these very extended communities. My father's family is from Queensbridge projects and my grandmother, Khadija Mohamed, is, in many ways, very similar to Yuri in being a community leader, a person providing incredible levels of mutual aid, raising other people's kids, feeding other people's kids, her own extended family as well. She raised nine children.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Wow. Akemi, I once heard you talk about your grandmothers as being your heroes and people normally ask you about Yuri, but not as much about Khadija. So thank you so much for just bringing her story into this as well.

Akemi Kochiyama:
Oh, yeah. And so she grew up in the Lower East Side and then was married very young and started having kids very young and really, I mean just such an incredible person. But I recently learned, it's just a fun fact, that she bought her first car, a used car, when she was very young on her own and she bought Shirley Chisholm's car.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Shirley Chisholm was my father's neighbor in Barbados.

Akemi Kochiyama:
Oh my God.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
They lived across the road. Shirley Chisholm's home was the only home that had a telephone. So everyone in the area would go to Shirley, and Shirley Chisholm was a TC alum.

Akemi Kochiyama:
That's so interesting. Yeah, of course. She's such an amazing person, right? So I've always loved Shirley Chisholm. So to learn that my grandmother's first used car was Shirley Chisholm's old green Mercedes, I just love that story.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
I want to fall out. Oh my gosh.

Akemi Kochiyama:
I'm like, of course Khadija Mohamed bought Shirley Chisholm's car. But anyway, it's just an interesting fun fact that I just learned. So I'd say those were huge influences on me. So I grew up in two public housing projects. I grew up alternately between Long Island City-

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
[inaudible 00:09:59].

Akemi Kochiyama:
When I was with my dad. They divorced when I was young, my parents divorced when I was three, but they were very, very close. I should also mention that my father was a member of the Black Panther Party and then my mother, my stepfather Akamau, who ended up being a great father to me until he passed in 1990, he was also a member of the Black Panther Party and Afro-American studies professor.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Wow.

Akemi Kochiyama:
So I was surrounded by information, knowledge, community, a lot of mutual aid, a lot of self-education and a lot of real talking about your identity and your history and your culture constantly. So there was that happening, but that's also when I was also at Spelman. So my grandfather passed in my senior year at Spelman College, so I'm at Spelman. While I was at Spelman, the amazing thing that happened is I came to Spelman, I transferred from UMass Amherst right after my mother passed away in 1989 and I transferred to Spelman. Right after that as Dr. Johnnetta Cole was also coming into leadership at Spelman College, having been at UMass Amherst for years and then had moved there. And I was, in some ways, following her because she's a great mentor to me in many ways.
And so I went to Spelman at that time as a black woman, first time a black woman is becoming leader of this historically black women's college. It was a very, very exciting time to be there in the mid '90s. And I was really nurtured there in a way that could never have happened at a different kind of school, just could not have happened. Spelman's very small and it has a very, very supportive staff, but I also had the incredible honor and privilege to be taught by some of the most important black women scholars of my time, I believe. So I studied women's studies under Dr. Johnnetta Cole, but also under Dr. Beverly Sheftall. They co-taught my intro to women's studies. So if anyone knows about these two women, to have them as your professors, your co-teachers for Intro to Women's Studies was an incredible-

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
It's like a vortex, I imagine.

Akemi Kochiyama:
Yeah, it was an amazing experience. And then Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall became my mentor and I had her for countless classes after that. But anyway, while I was there, to be able to study under women like that and to have, I had Dr. Gloria Wade Gayles taught my intro to 19th century African American lit, which is also an incredible thing, to have someone like Dr. Gloria Wade Gayles as your professor for that topic as well.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
These are women, as I'm listening to you, that have been so central to my dissertation work on black feminist though and just ways of being. And didn't mean to interrupt, but I'm over here, my body is vibrating as you're sharing these names because these are the women who were my mentors on paper. And the fact that you studied with them live is such an amazing thing.

Akemi Kochiyama:
And such a privilege. And this was the '90s, the mid '90s to be there at that time, I have to mention, Stacey Abrams was a year younger than me. So I was in the cohort of women who were really being nurtured and cultivated to lead. I know Stacey Abrams' name because she was leading then and we were all impressed. And I remember she was a year younger than me and she was registering people to vote.

Judy Yu:
That's amazing. That's amazing.

Akemi Kochiyama:
She was doing all this stuff. And I remember us being like she's going to be something big one day. I've been pulling for Stacey since then. But just to show you the kind of, these are my peers. Stacey Abrams was my peer. To tell you the women who come out of Spelman College, who are at Spelman College and then who were teaching us. And so I just have to really quickly, I do want to tell that story about Gloria Wade Gayles because I think it's really important that I think she really inspired me in incredible ways as an intellectual, I think, in ways that I didn't anticipate when I got there.
And one of the things she used to do in her class is that she made the students teach the class. So she told us in the very beginning of the class that we were going to teach the class and then in the beginning of each class, she was going to choose someone to teach the class, but she wouldn't tell us who until that day. So it required an incredible amount of preparation just to show up for that class because if you showed up that day for class, you could end up teaching.
And one of the things I loved and I will never forget and I have kept with me always is that when she would walk into class and decide, she would look at a student or two students and tell you that you were going to teach the class. And I remember her, she would point at you and say, "Akemi Kochiyama-Ladson, claim your space." Someone telling you to claim your intellectual space as a young woman of color in college is an incredibly empowering, impactful experience. I don't think it ever has left me.
I'm coming back into New York as my grandfather has passed and I'm stepping into doing all this work with her, I mean with my grandmother. And then I'm watching all these archivists coming in and out of the house from all over and professors. People are always coming in and out, all the stuff she's doing. But then also people are coming to look at her files and talk to her and I see things going off to colleges and universities and I'm like, "Who is that?" And she'd say, "Oh, I'm just going to take some of these papers to this school," or, "They're working on this project." But she was very vague about it, didn't really talk to me about it.
So I'm watching this happen for a couple of years and then during that time I decide to go to graduate school to get a PhD in cultural anthropology. And I start at the graduate center and I start working with Leith Mullings. Another incredible honor, incredible opportunity, another part of this really important intersectional feminist thread in terms of my professors and sheroes as Dr. Johnnetta Cole loves to say. When you work with Leith Mullings, you were immediately going to be doing a research project and getting published immediately.
So she was in the midst of doing all this work on infant mortality, black women and infant mortality and doing the post interviews after those, focus groups in Harlem, but also doing welfare reform research. So I'm doing that work and that research and I'm realizing that Yuri's archive and story and history and my family's place in this whole thing is maybe something that's important and that I should document and think about because now she's getting old and who's holding this information?

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Can I just say thank you for all of that?

Akemi Kochiyama:
Sure.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Judy and I have so many questions, but the context that you just laid out really covers so many of our questions because it allows us to see how you're connected, not just in black and Asian solidarity movements, but movements, whether it's welfare reform, incarcerated folks. If anyone knows anything about you, they know that you are in multiple communities. So before Judy says something, I just want to say thank you for that incredible context, for everything from your grandmother's and your grandfather's apartment to Spelman College to communities and back again.

Judy Yu:
Yeah. It sounds like your experience is a constellation of all of these people and places, memories, as well as how education has played a really significant role in the shaping of who you are, your identity and your work in activism. We're in October 2025 now and a lot has changed from how you have grown and what you've witnessed and your experiences of Spelman and also your doctoral studies. A question that we have is now, at this very difficult time in our country, what do you see as a call for action for the black and Asian American solidarity movement at this time? Because we're under attack on multiple issues with ICE raids and immigration reform and a very unsettling time for everyone, not only black and Asian communities, but really all people of color.

Akemi Kochiyama:
I would say that I think broad solidarity and empathy is really what's required. I think whether it's immigrants being attacked or people being unjustly incarcerated or squashed by poverty. And so I think one of the things that I think is most clear to me from just being around Yuri and my family and all the scholars and activists and artists and people that they engage with and I continue to engage with now is that you can't have your sympathy or your concern about humanity limited to any particular small thing because it's broader than that.
All of our humanity is connected. And as Malcolm said, the only way we're going to have liberation is if all oppressed people are liberated. And so I would say that the call to action is to be helping anyone who's vulnerable and needs your help. There's so many ways to be in community with people, to offer mutual aid, to do all kinds of things for people that support them in whatever's happening. So I feel like a lot of times people think of activism or calls to action as really grand or you have to be in the street marching or doing some major legislation or political act or something like that. I think it's much more every day than that.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
It makes me think a lot about James Baldwin, when he talks about going for broke and what are you willing to put on the line? And I think we certainly, I think in this country, particularly people of color, yes, poor people have always been in that vulnerable position. But like you said, Judy, to see it now in 2025, that feels like it's at this heightened level that it is going to require us perhaps learning from your grandmother's history, your mother's history, what lessons can we bring forward for the time that is now? So thank you for that connection.
So Akemi, we actually wish we could talk to you for hours, and we're not just saying that, we mean it, but we do want to have you talk a little bit about what you have going on now. I happen to know that there's a book that you're part of that just came out. Can you talk to us about what's happening now? What are you involved with? Also offer for our listeners some resources, for those who might be inspired by what they've heard, they want to get involved. Just talk to us a little bit about that to give some direction, but also to let us know what's going on with Akemi Kochiyama-Ladson right now.

Akemi Kochiyama:
Okay, sure. So a couple of things. I'm giving talks, lectures, archival presentations. I'm also doing walking tours. I'm really leaning into experiential learning and multimedia archives and oral history in this moment, when history is being suppressed, erased, lied to.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
All the things.

Akemi Kochiyama:
All the things.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
All the things.

Akemi Kochiyama:
And so really thinking about all these ways that we save our stories, we preserve our own histories, our narratives, we pass that on to our children, to communities. But also even stuff like doing the Yuri-Malcolm Mural project in Harlem, I'm realizing that my personal experience and perspective is relevant and useful for telling this story in many different ways. And I'm grateful to have the ability to operate on a community based level, but also in the academy and also as a scholar and also to publish is important and to be able to do things like this anthology I think are really important for people to get bits of this history or to get pieces of these stories out there where we can because not everyone's going to get the whole story. So those are the things I'm really focused on.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Two things though, Akemi, could you mention the title of the book?

Akemi Kochiyama:
Sure.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
And could you let our listeners know, particularly those who are in the New York tri-state area, where is the Yuri and Malcolm X ...

Akemi Kochiyama:
Mural.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Mural so that they can go and visit in case they haven't been?

Akemi Kochiyama:
Oh, sure. Okay. So I'll say first, the Yuri-Malcolm mural, which we named, the collective that put it together, we named it From Harlem with Love. So that's the name of it. I think we have an Instagram. Yeah, we have an Instagram page and social media. It's From Harlem with Love, if you look it up. It is on Old Broadway between 125th and 126th Street. So literally you can see my grandparents' building, 545 West 126th Street, from the mural. And if you're on the train, on the elevator train, on the one train going Uptown, you can actually see the mural when you come out on the train. So it's pretty cool.
So this book, this anthology that I'm a contributor to that just came out is called We Are Each Other's Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities. And it was edited by Rachel Kuo and Jaimee Swift and TD Tso. And it's the outcome of a long multi-year collaboration around Black and Asian solidarity. I think that also came to fruition or started to form around the time that we started to work together.

Judy Yu:
And also just finally, just during COVID and even up to now, mainstream media has always pitted our two communities together with the viral videos.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
You mean against each other?

Judy Yu:
Each other.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Yeah, totally.

Judy Yu:
Against each other. And it has become so troubling to see. And then also, I think it's actually very important for us to have this podcast and for us to formulate the Black and Asian Solidarity Collective as founders, because I was very concerned that our young people do not get accurate information and history about our history and our Collective movement during the civil rights movement. And even up to this day, whatever they see on Instagram or TikTok is not always true. So it's really important to be critical.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
No, and thank you for bringing that up. I'm just thinking about as far back as Rodney King and even before that, there's always been these tropes of pitting our communities against each other. And when tragedies happen, elevating that, amplifying that to say see. And what that has created was this type of hate that was fostered between black and Asian communities. And so Judy, and we'll talk more in our other episodes about how we came together as the Black and Asian solidarity Collective, but that was the purpose, to really interrupt the media narratives and say, "No, actually there's a history that goes back to the 1800s about black and Asians working together."
Muhammad Ali, Ida B. Wells, all of that. So you, in so many ways, embody that, Akemi, this work, which is why we wanted you as the first guest. We wanted you as someone leading off, talking about your life, talking about your powerful childhood. And we just want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We want to thank our listeners too. I want to give you a chance to say a final word before we officially thank our listeners and really thank our sponsor, too, of this podcast, which is a dream come true for us. Would you say that Dr. Yu?

Judy Yu:
Oh, absolutely. We're just so grateful to have this opportunity to be in community with you and everyone here at Digital Futures for supporting us. And also thank you so much, Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz for bringing us all together.

Akemi Kochiyama:
Absolutely. Yeah. As we were discussing earlier, it's just been so great to know you both. And I feel like, as we said, we were meant to be doing this together. I think this work is so important, talking about solidarity and enabling people to learn about history in a different way. Podcast is a different kind of media, and I think we have to reach people however we can. And I think it's important to deconstruct these stereotypes and these polarized or the characterization of the relationship between black and Asian people as always being polarized or in opposition to each other is absolutely an intentional thing to have us not work together and not be in solidarity. So I think we need to all keep working toward that. I really just support that and I always support teaching about history and so important that we know our history and that's the only way we're going to really work through all of this.

Judy Yu:
So Akemi, if people are just tuning in and learning about who your grandmother is, Yuri Kochiyama, how can you direct them to resources?

Akemi Kochiyama:
I'd say the best thing to do is to go to the yurikochiyama.com website. On that website, we have information about Yuri's life, a timeline. There's a link to the archives that are at UCLA as well as at the Rare Book and Manuscripts Library of Columbia University. There's also instructions about how to make an appointment to see the family's private collection.

Judy Yu:
And guests could also, listeners could go to our show notes on the podcast to get further information or additional resources.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
Thank you, Akemi ...

Akemi Kochiyama:
Thank you.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz:
For your life's work and for what you do. And thank you for tuning in everyone to this first episode of Rediscovering Black and Asian Solidarity. If you like this episode, comment on it, share it within your networks. And as you navigate what's ahead of you, please think about what solidarity you can create across communities. We ask that you take a moment to ask yourself what stories can I pass on? Tune in for our next episode. Until then remain in solidarity.
This podcast is supported by a multimodal fellowship from the Digital Futures Institute here at Teachers College Columbia University. Check out another great podcast, Groovin' Griot, in which hosts Ore Badaki and Azsaneé Truss center the African diaspora and honor the legacies of the Griot by talking to the storytellers in our communities who help unpack the role of dance and research and vice versa. Thank you for tuning in. Have a great day everyone.