Kazu Iijima (1918 - August 26, 2007) was a Japanese American activist and community organizer who was a co-founder of Asian Americans for Action and the United Asian Communities Center. Born Kazuko Ikeda in California, she grew up in Oakland, and attended college at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

. She encountered Marxist critiques of racism through her older sister and the

Young Communist League The Young Communist League (YCL) is the name used by the youth wing of various Communist parties around the world. The name YCL of XXX (name of country) originates from the precedent established by the Communist Youth International. Examples of YC ...

at Berkeley, and became involved in radical politics. By 1938, Ikeda helped to form the Oakland Nisei Democratic Club to encourage more Niseis to take up radical responses to working class issues and racism. Ikeda was still living and working in the Bay Area when Japanese Americans on the west coast were subjected to incarceration under

Executive Order 9066 Executive Order 9066 was a United States presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. This order authorized the secretary of war to prescribe certain ...

. She was first at

Tanforan Assembly Center The Tanforan Assembly Center was created to temporarily detain nearly 8,000 Japanese Americans, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area, under the auspices of Executive Order 9066. After the order was signed in February 1942, the Wartime Civil Cont ...

, and then

Topaz Topaz is a silicate mineral of aluminium and fluorine with the chemical formula Al Si O( F, OH). It is used as a gemstone in jewelry and other adornments. Common topaz in its natural state is colorless, though trace element impurities can mak ...

concentration camp in Utah. She married Tak Iijima in Utah (he had been drafted into the US Army just before Pearl Harbor), and was released to move to Mississippi with him soon after. After the war, the couple settled in New York City, and began to raise a family. Although Iijima joined the Japanese American Committee for Democracy at that time, it wasn't until the late 1960s that she returned to organizing with the founding of Asian Americans for Action. Along with other Japanese American radicals like

Yuri Kochiyama was an American civil rights activist. Influenced by her Japanese-American family's experience in an American internment camp, her association with Malcolm X, and her Maoist beliefs, she advocated for many causes, including black separatism, t ...

and Shizu "Minn" Matsuda, Iijima built the AAA as a platform for opposing the Vietnam War and for nurturing grassroots Asian American solidarity. The organization was notable as the first group to define itself as pan-Asian, multigenerational, and politically progressive. One of the first actions they took after forming in 1969 was to challenge the

Japanese American Citizens League The is an Asian American civil rights charity, headquartered in San Francisco, with regional chapters across the United States. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) describes itself as the oldest and largest Asian American civil right ...

to take a stand against the Vietnam War.The group continued to evolve, changing its name in 1976 to Union of Activists to emphasize political struggle rather than identity, and finally breaking up in 1980 over irreconcilable internal differences.Karen L. Ishizuka, “Flying in the Face of Race, Gender, Class and Age: A Story about Kazu Iijima, One of the Mothers of the Asian American Movement on the First Year Anniversary of Her Death,” Amerasia Journal 35, 2 (2009): 30-31

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Iijima, Kazu 1918 births 2007 deaths American civil rights activists of Japanese descent Japanese-American internees