The Westport Library Resource Guides: Kiyoshi Kuromiya: About

Watch

Kiyoshi Kuromiya was featured in a Google Doodle on June 03, 2022.

Who was Kiyoshi Kuromiya?

Kuromiya was born May 9, 1943, in the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a Japanese-American incarceration camp in Wyoming. At the age of two, his family moved to Monrovia, Calif. He remained on the West Coast until college, when he moved cross-country to attend the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There, he had a political awakening. Che Gossett, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University who is writing a book about Kuromiya, said he would later refer to himself as the “Forrest Gump of activism” because he was involved in so many different movements.

He participated in civil rights protests, and in March 1965, traveled to Montgomery, Alabama where he was beaten unconscious while participating in the Selma to Montgomery march—he had to get 20 stitches in his head, according to a June 17, 1997, interview with Marc Stein, creator of the Philadelphia LGBT History Project. He was also an ardent anti-war demonstrator. In April 1968, he posted fliers inviting UPenn students to the university’s Van Pelt Library to watch a dog being burned in a protest over the use of napalm (which was deployed widely during the Vietnam War). When more than 2,000 outraged and curious students showed up, they found a flier that read: “Congratulations on your anti-napalm protest. You saved the life of a dog. Now, how about saving the lives of tens of thousands of people in Vietnam.”

In the early 1980s, as the AIDS virus was beginning to devastate the gay community, Kuromiya re-focused his activism around AIDS patients’ rights. As one of the founders of the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP, he co-wrote its first standard for care for AIDS, the first document of its kind. In a 1994 Philadelphia Inquirer profile, the paper described him as “the city’s most knowledgeable layman about HIV.” Continue reading from TIME Magazine