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The first time I saw the famous photograph of Yuri Kochiyama was only a few years ago. The black-and-white photograph was snapped right after Malcolm X was shot at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965. He is splayed out on the floor, surrounded by a crowd trying to revive him. She is the only person tending to him whose face isn’t cropped out. She is kneeling in her black coat, cradling Malcolm X’s head on her lap. Upon closer inspection, I notice that she is propping his head up with her two hands while another woman is undoing his tie to better see to his bullet wounds. She looks like she is in her forties, wearing cat-eye glasses that frame her thin angular features. Who is this Asian woman? And why am I surprised to see an Asian woman in this photograph?

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    Kochiyama was born in San Pedro, California, in 1921 to a middle-class Japanese American family. She was a happy and devoutly Christian teenager who grew up on the white side of town, and her life there was uneventful—until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Soon afterwards, her father, whose health was already frail, was falsely accused of espionage and taken to prison, where he was detained and questioned for five weeks. He died in a hospital right after his release, hallucinating that Kochiyama’s brother was his interrogator because her brother, who had enlisted in the war, was wearing a U.S. army uniform at his bedside. When her ailing father turned his attention to Kochiyama, he asked in a panic, “Who beat you up?” But no one had touched her.

The rest of the family was evacuated to Jerome, a concentration camp that imprisoned 8,500 Japanese internees in the swamplands of Arkansas. Forced to give up all their property and life savings, which is now estimated at $6 billion, Japanese families were crowded into drafty barracks that were built like the living quarters of prisoner-of-war camps. Each person was issued a straw mattress and an army blanket. There was no heat during the harsh winters and no indoor plumbing, so that if someone had to go at night, they had to trudge out in the mud to the latrines while a guard tower’s search light was trained on them the whole way. And yet, even while interned, Kochiyama was almost delusionally upbeat, organizing letter-writing campaigns to fellow Nisei soldiers who had enlisted to prove they were American patriots, until letters began pouring back with the word “deceased.” According to her biographer Diane Fujino, Japanese American soldiers helped liberate thirty thousand survivors in Dachau, which was fairly ironic considering that their own families were still behind barbed wire in America.

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    Upon release, Kochiyama returned to San Pedro. She couldn’t find a waitressing job anywhere because no one wanted to hire a Jap. It wasn’t until she and her husband moved to Harlem that she began to understand what had happened to her. Until then, nothing deterred her patriotism, not the FBI whisking her father away to prison without reason, not his death, nor even her family’s internment. She still clung to the myth she learned in her white church and school: that the United States was a land of liberty. What lay beyond the fault lines of her belief system was only fear. When Kochiyama found a waitressing job in New York, her black coworkers were the first to educate her about America’s racist history. Finally, Kochiyama had a vocabulary, a historical context. What had happened to her wasn’t a nightmarish aberration but the norm.

Kochiyama’s optimism was also what made her an extraordinary activist. Since she was young, she’d had a preternatural gift for bringing people together. After befriending her black neighbors and coworkers, she became an ardent civil rights activist. She later met Malcolm X at a demonstration protesting the discriminatory hiring practices of a construction company. He was mobbed by fans but when he saw the lone Asian woman standing back, he reached out his arm to shake her hand. To his surprise, Kochiyama challenged him, asking him why he wasn’t an integrationist. Struck by her gumption, X invited her to the weekly Organization of Afro-American Unity meeting, where she became further radicalized, turning not only anti-racist but also anti-capitalist.

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    Kochiyama had a compulsion to help others, and was adamant that she not be the center of attention, which was admirable but also gave me pause; made me question if there was something inherently Asian and female about her selflessness, which probably betrays my own internalized chauvinism and my own rather predictable preference for the melancholic poet or the messianic hero rather than organizers, like Kochiyama, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes. In fact, at a time when identities can be walled off, it’s essential to lift up the life of Kochiyama, whose sense of we was porous and large, whose mission was to amplify the voices of others while amplifying hers. She fought tirelessly for prison rights reform; her home was known as “Grand Central” for black civil rights activists; and she was one of seven activists who occupied the Statue of Liberty in support of Puerto Rican independence in 1977. Later, in 1988, she helped lead the Japanese American activist movement that demanded and received a formal apology and reparations for the internment camps.

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    In 1968, students at UC Berkeley invented the term Asian American to inaugurate a new political identity. Radicalized by the black power movement and anti-colonial movement, the students invented that name as a refusal to apologize for being who they were. It’s hard to imagine that the origin of Asian America came from a radical place, because the moniker is now flattened and emptied of any blazing political rhetoric. But there was nothing before it. Asians either identified by their nationality or were called Oriental. The activist Chris Iijima said, “It was less a marker for what one was and more for what one believed.” Some activists were so inspired by the Black Panthers that groups such as I Wor Kuen in New York City and the Red Guard Party in San Francisco downright copied the Black Panther signature style—their armbands, their berets—while initiating their own ten-point program where they gave out free breakfast to poor Chinese American children.