The Bridges Yuri Built
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The Bridges Yuri Built: How Yuri Kochiyama Marched Across Movements
By Kai Naima Williams
Illustrated by Anastasia Magloire Williams
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THE BRIDGES YURI BUILT: HOW YURI KOCHIYAMA MARCHED ACROSS MOVEMENTS introduces one of the 20th-century’s most notable freedom fighters, Yuri Kochiyama (1921 – 2014) to the next generation of young readers.
Debut children's picture book author Kai Naima Williams – great-granddaughter of Yuri Kochiyama – intimately chronicles the experiences and lessons, hardships and victories, and people and places that shaped Yuri’s life and influenced her activism. From Yuri’s incarceration in a Japanese-American concentration camp during World War II to her participation in movements organizing for better schools in Harlem to her close friendship with Malcolm X, Yuri never wavered in her belief in the power of people – especially young people – to bring about social change. Through imaginative writing and vibrant illustrations (Anastasia Magloire Williams), THE BRIDGES YURI BUILT is sure to inspire young readers to embrace Yuri’s unswerving belief that together we can build a bridge to a better world.
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Read the Kirkus Review here
A celebration of the life and legacy of a Japanese American Civil Rights activist.
Rather than directly urge readers to adopt her forebear Yuri Kochiyama as a role model, the author simply relates select experiences in her great-grandmother’s life that turned her into an activist and that portray her in action. Born in California and imprisoned in an Arkansas incarceration camp during World War II, Yuri formed a group of correspondents to write letters of support to Japanese American soldiers. Facing racial discrimination after the war as well, she then leveraged that organizing experience while quietly working her way into the inner circles of the Civil Rights Movement—she was close enough to Malcolm X to cradle his head in her lap moments after he was shot—and going on to be a freedom fighter, building bridges connecting many social causes. “For Yuri,” the author writes in her afterword, “solidarity was not an ideal but an embodied, necessary practice.” Images of her—a slight figure in owlish eyeglasses, raising a defiant fist, facing a New York shop window with signs reading “No Japs” and “Colored entrance in rear,” waving protest banners, hosting meetings and open houses in her Harlem apartment, and standing here with fellow activists and there alone at her ironing board writing letters—serve to underscore her lifelong energy and dedication.
Eloquent and inspiring.(Picture-book biography. 7-9)