Respected Monrovia Japanese-American Civil and Gay Rights Activist Remembered

By Susie Ling

Steven Kiyoshi Kuromiya liked to say that he was conceived in Monrovia. He is now laid to rest at Monrovia’s Live Oak Cemetery. But Steve spent few of his adult years being part of Monrovia. A member of Monrovia High’s Class of 1961, Kuromiya is a nationally recognized civil rights and gay rights activist.

Stevie had deep roots in Monrovia. His grandfather, Hisamitsu James Kuromiya moved the family to California Street, just south of Colorado in 1929. Grandfather was a vegetable peddler with six children. When elderly neighbors wanted to sell their property, potential buyers complained to City Hall about the “Japs” living in the area just north of the trolley tracts. Monrovia in the 1930s was a racially segregated community. African-Americans, Mexicans, and the few Asians were restricted to the area south of Olive. The Kuromiyas were evicted and found another place near Primrose and Huntington Drive (today’s Pep Boys). Stevie’s father, Hiroshi, graduated from Monrovia-Arcadia-Duarte High School near 1935. On Pearl Harbor Sunday in 1941, Hiroshi had a pre-planned engagement party with his Glendora fiancé, Emiko.

World War II’s Executive Order 9066 led to the unjust forced evacuation of Japanese Americans and with other Monrovians, the Kuromiyas were brought to the Pomona Fairgrounds. War authorities would not place local Japanese Americans at the nearby Santa Anita Assembly Center. The Kuromiyas – and Uyedas, Asadas, Sawadas, Soyeshimas, Tsuneishis, etc – were then transported to Heart Mountain Concentration Camp in Wyoming.

Steven Kiyoshi Kuromiya was born in the Heart Mountain camp in 1943. Steven was the family’s first Sansei, a third generation American of Japanese descent. After the War, the Kuromiyas returned to Monrovia in 1946. Hiroshi worked in produce and Steven graduated with honors from Monrovia High School in 1961. Steven was Vice President of the History Club and Art Editor for Advertising of the Monrovian yearbook.

After high school, Steven was admitted to several universities and went on scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania just as the 1960s civil rights movement was at its height. He joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Like others in that era of change, Steven shed his “slave name” and was then called Kiyoshi. In a publicity tactic, Kiyoshi posted leaflets on campus that he intended to burn a dog on the steps of the school library. When thousands arrived to protest such cruelty, Kiyoshi said, “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?”

By March of 1965, Kiyoshi was of a handful of Asian-Americans fighting for African-American voting rights in Selma. Kuromiya was leading a high school student group to the State Capitol in Montgomery when he was brutally clubbed by Alabama state troopers. Peter Cummings reported on March 24, 1965 in The Harvard Crimson, “Within seconds, the quiet streets were filled with screams. The horses rode straight into the crowds on both sides of the street… One boy, Steven K. Kuromiya, an architectural student at the University of Pennsylvania, held his ground. Four horsemen converged on him, clubbed him to the ground, and rode over him. Curled in a fetal position, Kuromiy[a] tried to cover his head with his arms as unmounted deputies clubbed him, and kicked him in stomach and groin. Finally, they left him, as blood streamed in glistening lines across his face and formed a scarlet pool on the sidewalk.”

In a Life Magazine piece, Kiyoshi is quoted to say, “I was in the South during the spring and summer of 1965. After Reverend James Reeb was killed, we marched and I was clubbed down and hospitalized. When you get treated this way, you suddenly know what it is like to be a Black in Mississippi or a peasant in Vietnam. You learn something about going through channels then too. I gave my story to an FBI agent in the hospital. He took seven pages of notes, but I remember thinking at the time it was probably just about as effective as relaying information to the ACLU via the House Un-American Activities Committee. Nothing ever came of it, at any rate.” Records show that FBI monitored Kiyoshi Kuromiya from 1960 to 1972.

Kuromiya would become close to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and during the week of King’s funeral, Kiyoshi helped to care for the King children in Vine City.

Kiyoshi was involved in the gay rights rallies by the early 1960s. After the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, Kiyoshi helped launch the multiracial Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in Philadelphia. In December, the GLF voted to monetarily support the Black Panthers. In September of 1970, Kiyoshi was part of Huey Newton’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to “remake the United States.” Kiyoshi wrote against the homophobia within the radical movement in the United States and suggested that “the revolution will not be complete until all men are free to express their love for one another sexually.”

Kiyoshi said that it was at Monrovia High that he came to realize that “even more important than my racial identity was my gayness.” As a Japanese-American, he had rocks thrown at him on the way to grade school. He said that when he was 11 years old, he was caught by the Monrovia Police engaging in harmless sexual play with a 16-year -old boy. Kuromiya was sent to juvenile hall for three days and gained notoriety as a Japanese-American in jail. Kuromiya said the judge “told me [and my parents] that I was in danger of leading a lewd and immoral life… I spent two years trying to find a definition for the word lewd, but I couldn’t figure out how it was spelled, so I was in the dark as to what my future held for me.”

Kuromiya was a man of many talents. He was a nationally ranked Scrabble player and a Kundalini yoga master. He was also a food critic. He worked with futurist R. Buckminster Fuller on the book, Critical Path (1982), published after Fuller’s death.

In 1988, Kiyoshi was a charter member of Philadelphia’s ACT UP, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. At about the same time, he founded the Critical Path Project in Philadelphia. With the mantra “knowledge is power,” Critical Path established an online clearinghouse for AIDS patients and researchers worldwide. Both of these organizations continue to bring awareness and solution paths to the AIDS/HIV pandemic. Kiyoshi took one further step to help people with HIV/AIDS; he was lead plaintiff in Kuromiya v. the United States of America (1999), a class action suit in the U.S. Supreme Court to legalize the use of medical marijuana. Kuromiya died a year later on May 10, 2000, one day after this 57th birthday.

Yosh Kuromiya is Kiyoshi’s 93-year-old uncle and recently said, “Kiyoshi had an aura about him. He had such confidence and courage. Whatever he did, he was very positive. He would dare do things that most people would hesitate – including myself. Although he was a generation younger than me, I referred to him as my teacher. I learned more about humanity from him than any other source.”