The Google Doodle on May 19th signaled a significant milestone. And, it got me thinking about the power of coalition building.

The simple illustration featured the late social justice activist Yuri Kochiyama on what would have been her 95th birthday. Not only is it significant that it was an acknowledgement of May as Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, but it’s also meaningful that a fierce social justice “warrior” was featured. You can view the image in Google Doodle library here.

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The Google Doodle was based off of this photo of Kochiyama, taken at an anti-war demonstration in New York’s Central Park in the late 1960s. (Photograph courtesy of the Kochiyama Family and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.)

Yuri Kochiyama was an unexpected, and so very welcome, choice!

Born in California, she was imprisoned for two years in the internment camp in Arkansas for Japanese Americans during World War II.  This grave violation of her civil rights, along with an up close view of the Jim Crow South, transformed her.

Her experience resulted in her commitment to protest and resistance movements around the world. Kochiyama eventually moved to Harlem with her family where she became deeply involved in African American, Latino, and Asian American liberation and empowerment movements.

Her friendship with Malcolm X, with whom she shared a birthday, was immortalized in the photograph on the cover of LIFE magazine. In the picture, she cradled his head after he was shot in Harlem’s Audubon Theater, comforting him in his very last moments of life.

Together with other internees, including her late husband Bill, she persevered in obtaining a formal apology from the U.S. government in 1988 along with reparations of $20,000 for the estimated 60,000 surviving internees.

Yet, the fact that she converted to Islam seems to be lost many threads of the narrative about her.

She truly embodied an intersectional life, with keen understanding of the power of coalition building. And, she knew that people had more in common with each other than it seemed on the surface. So, it is fitting that the doodle, by artist Alyssa Winans, features an iconic image of Yuri Kochiyama at a rally.

It is even more fitting that Google highlighted an unsung hero both as a celebration of her birthday and AAPI Heritage Month!