A photo in Life Magazine in 1965 captured an unidentified Japanese American woman holding the bloodied head of Malcolm X shortly after he was shot and killed.
That unidentified woman, according to NPR, was Yuri Kochiyama.
In an interview with Democracy Now in 2008, Yuri described what happened.
“I just picked up his head and just put it on my lap,” Kochiyama said. “I said, ‘Please, Malcolm! Please, Malcolm! Stay alive!’ ”
Malcolm X and Kochiyama had met just 16 months earlier in a Brooklyn courthouse. Kochiyama was among the hundreds arrested after a Brooklyn protest of people mostly from the African American community.
According to the biography Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama by Diane Fujino, chair of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Asian American studies department, Malcolm X walked in the courthouse before a hearing.
The protestors mobbed him, each wanting to shake his hand.
“I felt so bad that I wasn’t black, that this should be just a black thing,” she said in the interview with Democracy Now. “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.’ ”
Kochiyama mustered the courage and called out to Malcolm X, “Can I shake your hand?”
“What for?” he demanded.
To congratulate you for giving direction to your people, she said.
The two would strike an unlikely friendship. You can read about how that friendship developed and how Malcolm X responded to Kochiyama’s request on NPR.
