Civil Rights Activist Yuri Kochiyama on Her Internment in a WWII Japanese-American Detention Camp & Malcolm X's Assassination

From the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay we now move to an earlier era of imprisonment in U.S. history. This week marks the 66th anniversary of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066. The order forced more than 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent into internment camps. This included nearly 70,000 American citizens. The Supreme Court upheld the establishment of the internment camps after civil rights pioneer Fred Korematsu was jailed for refusing to be interned.

Korematsu said years later “In order for things like this to never happen, we have to protest… so don’t be afraid to speak up.”

We now turn to excerpts from our 2006 interview with civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama. Her father was detained in 1942 hours after Pearl Habor was attacked. He died soon after. The rest of Yuri Kochiyama’s family was eventually sent to an internment camp. She recalled the day federal agents detained her father.

Yuri Kochiyama, longtime civil rights activist, interned at a U.S. concentration camp during World War II, friend of Malcolm X and with him as he died. Yuri Kochiyama is the author of “Passing It On”, a memoir.

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