Harlem: A University-Without-Walls
Yuri Kochiyama's Education and Malcolm X's Liberation School
Born and raised in San Pedro, California, Yuri Kochiyama’s relocation to New York was transformative. While the move marked initially a significant cultural shift, it soon became a deeply political as well. This proved especially true after Yuri and her growing family moved north into Harlem. In her own words, she attests, “Harlem has been my university-without-walls… No college in the U.S. could have taught me so poignantly and effectively about realities in American life.”1 As noted previously, Yuri quickly became involved with a number of movements like the Congress of Racial Equity (CORE) and the Harlem Parents Committee (HPC). This latter organization would soon provide the Kochiyamas with a unique learning opportunity when it established a Freedom School in Harlem in October 1963 (as part of a larger movement). Diane Fujino, in her biography of Yuri, relates:
…[I]t was probably Yuri, in recognizing how little her family knew about Black history, who suggested that they attend each Saturday. The purpose of the Freedom School was to “‘teach our children to reclaim and proudly identify with their history and culture’; and to teach all people that the heritage and culture of the American Negro is not a barren one.” Students learned the basics about Black history, including Africans in antiquity, the slave trade, the colonial experience, segregation, and resistance. Their instructors were respected Black activists and intellectuals, including James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Richard Moore, and John Henrik Clarke. Although the school curriculum was new to Yuri, her experiences living among low-income people of color, her germinating experiences as an activist, and her open-mindedness enabled her to consider these new ideas, which for the most part, made sense to her. Yuri eagerly absorbed the material: “I read everything I could. The reading was really helpful, especially W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Soul of Black Folk. These readings changed my life.”2
In an earlier account, Yuri offers more about this experience. She recounts:
Freedom schools were set up all over the city, but I think Harlem Freedom School lasted the longest… [it] lasted a year and a half. It was organized resistance to what everyone saw as a destructive situation. My three oldest children went there. They were in the class that Peter Bailey taught. Isaiah and Sylvia Robinson, Bob and Dorothy Washington, Edwardina Brown, and others organized the school. Almost every week there would be outside speakers like James Baldwin, Anna Hedgeman, Glenn Carrington, Mr. Micheaux of the Liberation Bookstore. A lot of artists and writers from the Harlem Renaissance period came. They also brought up Fanny Lou Hamer from Mississippi. It really was an eye-opener and, for most of us, the beginning of our learning about Afro-American history. That’s where I first heard about Marcus Garvey. For the first time since becoming an adult, I started reading again; I hadn’t read anything for years and years. We read Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. But Garvey really caught the imagination.3
Garvey, of course, was important to Malcolm X as well in that both his parents, Earl Little and Louise Helen Norton Little were involved with his movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).4
As for Yuri’s formation in liberation, the HPC’s Freedom School was just one part of a greater whole for her. In fact, the same month that the school opened, Yuri’s first meeting with Malcolm had happened just several days prior. After that fateful encounter, Yuri became increasingly interested in what Malcolm had to share with the rest of the Harlem community. This too proved important for Yuri. She relates, “And hearing Malcolm define nationalism, going to his rallies at the Audubon Ballroom every Sunday, it was an education in itself.”5
Indeed, this education under Malcolm X’s vision had a formal dimension. As Fujino explains, “Yuri, at times accompanied by Billy, Audee, or Aichi, made an effort to attend Malcolm’s talks. It was at one of these talks, after Malcolm returned from abroad in late November 1964, that he invited Yuri to join the OAAU’s Liberation School.”6 Malcolm’s newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), operating out of the Hotel Theresa on 125th Street, was intent on opening its own school. Yuri not only attended, but became a card carrying member of Malcolm’s new formed organization.
The founding of the Liberation School was well timed since the Harlem Freedom School was ending. In this new setting, Yuri’s racial consciousness was sharpened even further. As she relates:
After the Freedom School closed, I went to Malcolm’s Liberation School. I don’t think the concept of Third World people was familiar to me until then. What we went through during the war years certainly should have made me think about what happens to people of color: the government didn’t intern the Italians or the Germans. Something inside me was always telling me: Look at who you are. You’re a person of color. This is the kind of treatment you’re going to get.7
It wasn’t until her time in Harlem, however, that this particular sense of solidarity would rise and surface. As for the Liberation School, Yuri’s biography compiles the most complete account her experience with it. Fujino writes:
Her first class was on December 5, 1964, in suite 128 at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. As contained in Yuri’s notes, on this day, James Shabazz, who functioned as Malcolm’s chief assistant at the OAAU, discussed twentieth-century slaves. He taught many things: how euphemistic language is used to keep people unaware and downtrodden; how England initiated the termination of the African slave trade for economic - and not humanitarian - reasons; how light skinned Africans were given preferential treatment over darker Africans in the days of slavery and today; and how the lord-serf relationship has persisted over time, in different forms for different economies (e.g., master-slave, boss-worker, police-Negro). These ideas probably reinforced material that Yuri head learned in the Harlem Freedom School.8
Concerning that first day of class, Yuri recollects:
To my surprise, Brother Shabazz started talking about linkages between Africans and Asians. I was the only non-Black there. I don’t know if he spoke about this because I was there, to help me connect my heritage to what we were learning, or if he would have lectured on this anyway. Brother Shabazz, who speaks some Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, wrote the kanji [Japanese and Chinese characters] for Tao and various marial arts forms on the board. He explained the spirituality underlying these martial arts - that they were exercises to help one move toward God similar to how Islam did.9
Another teacher at the Liberation School, James Campbell, relates his memory of Yuri from that first day in December, sharing:
She came into the class at the [Hotel] Theresa, which was also the OAAU office. Malcolm’s office was at the end of the room, a small space, a cubbyhole almost, behind the chalkboard where announcements were made. She just appeared. I don’t know how she found out about the classes. But it was significant because there was hardly any diversity in the group. I was gratified to see a person of Asian ancestry there. She also stood out because she took notes throughout the session. Over time, I noticed that she usually stayed to chat with someone after class. Her pattern of attendance, note taking, and chatting with people in class became apparent to me. It was a consistent pattern and I came to see her as a very serious person.10
The Liberation school met consistently and Yuri attended diligently showing up week after week every Saturday morning until the school closed in the early half of April 1965, not long after Malcolm X’s assassination.
Many years later, Yuri would look back on these days of learning as critical and pivotal for her. In an interview she states:
One of the great lessons Malcolm taught people was to learn their own history. Know your history. Know the world. Be proud of who you are. He would say, “If you don’t know who you are and where you came from, how can you know what direction to go in the future?” Through the process of discovering our own histories, many peoples - Africans, Asians, Puerto Ricans living in the United States - learned to throw off our internalized racism and develop pride in our heritage. But don’t stop there. Learn about the histories of other people. And learn about the history of social movements because that is how you learn to create social change.11
Yet, given what Harlem in particular offered in expanding Yuri’s horizons, I think it appropriate to end with some wisdom from Yuri herself - wisdom gained from being in community with so many others. With equal measures humility and gratitude, Yuri Kochiyama shares what we all ought to take to heart:
But one doesn’t learn just by reading a few books and attending a few lectures. Many I consider my best teachers were just ordinary folks of all ages, from the elderly to young street bloods, and many from behind the prison walls.12
Diane C. Fujino, The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama: Heartbeat of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 134.
Fujino, Revolutionary Life, 125.
Yuri Kochiyama, Fishmerchant’s Daughter: An Oral History, Vol. 2, ed. Arthur Tobier (New York: Community Documentation Workshop, 1982), 6.
Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965), 1.
Kochiyama, Fishmerchant’s Daughter, Vol. 2, 7.
Fujino, Revolutionary Life, 148.
Kochiyama, Fishmerchant’s Daughter, Vol. 2, 7.
Fujino, Revolutionary Life, 148.
Fujino, Revolutionary Life, 148-149.
Fujino, Revolutionary Life, 149.
Fujino, Revolutionary Life, 158.
Kochiyama, Fishmerchant’s Daughter, Vol. 2, 7.