# Passing the Torch *A Biography of Yuri Kochiyama* — Legendary Biographies No. 050 - **Subject:** Mary Yuriko Nakahara Kochiyama - **Written by:** Solomon Treadway - **Shelf:** Movements / Civil Rights - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 222 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 222 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-066-9) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-211-3) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/050-passing-the-torch.html ## About this book February 21, 1965, the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Mary Yuriko Kochiyama is in the audience when Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X Johnson assassinate Malcolm X. The photograph that ran in Life magazine the next week shows her on the stage cradling his head in her lap. She is forty-three years old. Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier, in San Pedro, California, where Mary Nakahara was born in 1921 to Japanese immigrant parents, and follows the arc through the Jerome and Topaz internment camps of the Second World War, the postwar move to Harlem, the late friendship with Malcolm X, the lifetime of activism in the Asian-American, Black, and Puerto-Rican independence movements, the long campaign for Japanese-American reparations that produced the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, and the thirty years of her life that followed — until her death in 2014 — as the elder of the movement she had helped build. What emerges is a portrait of a Nisei activist whose forty-year political education began in a tar-paper barracks in Arkansas and whose moral compass never wavered after. ## Contents 1. The Fishing Town 2. The Day the World Broke 3. Jerome 4. After the Wire 5. Harlem 6. Malcolm 7. The Apartment 8. The Third World Left 9. Political Prisoners 10. Redress 11. The Letter Writer 12. Bill 13. The Difficult Questions 14. The Photograph 15. Solidarity as Practice 16. Berkeley 17. What She Built 18. June First 19. The Bridges ## Questions **Who is Passing the Torch about?** Mary Yuriko Nakahara Kochiyama. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Passing the Torch — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,759 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 69,500 words, 19 chapters, 222 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought. In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.