"Peace Empowers": The Testimony of Aki Kurose, a Woman of Color in the Pacific Northwest

Much had changed in Seattle after the war. "All the porters, before the war, were Japanese," she explained. "And when we were all incarcerated, then most of the porters became blacks." When Japanese Americans were released from the concentration camps and returned to Seattle in 1945, the railroads began to give the Japanese their jobs back. Black porters feared that the returning Japanese would take away their new jobs. Kurose's father, who was a porter at Union Station, then helped to form a multiracial porter's union so that Japanese Americans and African Americans could work together. Kurose's father told her, "You know, we're just being pitted against each other. We need to pool ourselves together and form a union, and we'll both benefit." It was one of the first multiracial unions. She became the secretary for the union and soon thereafter became involved with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

CORE had been founded in 1942 in Chicago by an interracial group of students, many of whom were members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization that sought to change racist attitudes through nonviolent direct action for social justice.(5) Kurose's life intersected with CORE in several ways. Kurose had been influenced by literature from FOR while in she was in the concentration camp during the war, and an active CORE chapter existed in Wichita, Kansas, mainly comprised of students from Friends University. From 1948 until 1950, she lived in Chicago. CORE, with its commitment to a strategy of interracial, nonviolent direct action, must have appealed to Kurose. She commented that her involvement with CORE "seemed like a natural thing to do, and just kind of worked." The Seattle chapter of CORE was active in the 1960s in direct-action campaigns for black employment, open housing, school desegregation, and desegregation of the construction unions.(6)

In 1948 Aki Kato married Junelow (Junx) Kurose, who had been recently discharged from the U.S. Army. Junx was Aki's brother's best friend, and Aki was Junx's sister's best friend before the war. After they married the couple moved first to Chicago to join Junx's parents because he was their only surviving son. After a couple of years they returned to Seattle because Junx decided he did not want to raise children in Chicago and he missed the Northwest.

The couple experienced different forms of discrimination upon their return to Seattle in 1950. Junx found work at Boeing as a machinist after discovering he could not get unionized work as an electrician because the electrical unions in Seattle excluded Japanese Americans in the construction unions. The construction unions continued to discriminate against nonwhites well into the 1960s. In 1969, out of twenty-seven hundred electrical workers in the Seattle building trade unions only two were nonwhite.(7) The couple initially lived with Kurose's parents while they searched for their own housing but quickly learned that restrictive housing practices in Seattle presented barriers to finding a place to live. As a result of this experience, Aki Kurose became active in the open-housing movement through the AFSC. During the 1950s she and others identified real estate companies and other groups that practiced discrimination in housing and areas where discrimination existed. In recognition for her role in the open-housing movement, the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) in 1999 named its North Seattle affordable housing development for families with children the Aki Kurose Village. Aki Kurose Village provides for a place of transition for such families, from area homeless shelters to permanent housing in Seattle.(8)