Yoneda, Karl Gozo, 1906-1999

Karl Gozo Yoneda (July 15, 1906 - May 9, 1999)

Yoneda and his wife returned to San Francisco and resumed work in the Communist Party. They urged Party leaders to overturn its racist wartime exclusion policy against members of Japanese ancestry. For a decade, due to health problems, Yoneda became an owner of a chicken farm but eventually returned to work on the docks as a member of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) until his retirement in 1972. From the late 1960s onward, he served as a guest lecturer in Asian American Studies classes on college campuses sharing his scholarship and personal experiences relating to Japanese American labor history and activism. He and his wife helped organize the first pilgrimages to Manzanar and were involved in early initiatives calling for redress and reparations . In the 1980s and 1990s, he continued to join picket lines and protests and express solidarity for movements for social justice, especially those organized by young Asian Americans.

Karl Gozo Yoneda (Japanese: 米田剛三, 1906–1999) was a Japanese American activist, union organizer, World War II veteran and author. He played a substantial role in the founding of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
<br></br>
Born in Glendale, California in 1906 to Japanese immigrants, Hideo and Kazu. In 1913, Yoneda's father, now diagnosed with tuberculosis, took the family to Japan to live in their native village just outside Hiroshima. His father died two years later, leaving his mother to raise him and his two sisters.
<br></br>
After World War I, Yoneda went to high school in Hiroshima. When he was 15, he organized a strike among the delivery boys of the powerful Chugoku Shimbun newspaper. The company had increased the delivery routes without increasing pay.
<br></br>
Such experiences led Yoneda to progressive ideas. He began reading the works of anarchists and socialists such as Karl Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Bakunin, and the blind anarchist poet Vasili Eroshenko, whom he hitch-hiked to meet in Beijing when he was 16 years old. He stayed with Eroshenko two months and went back to Japan. There, he participated in workers strikes and began publishing a journal for poor farmers, Tsuchi. For that, he was beaten and thrown into jail.
<br></br>
In 1942, Karl, Elaine, and son Tom were unjustly incarcerated at Manzanar. Karl registered for the draft and joined the army in November. He served in the United States Military Intelligence Service as a Japanese language specialist in China, Burma and India.He served valiantly and was decorated several times.
<br></br>
After the war, Elaine and Karl continued to work throughout their lives for the unions and anti-war efforts. His mother had survived the atom bomb. In 1960, they visited her on the occasion of attending a peace conference in Tokyo.
<br></br>
After he retired in 1972, he continued to organize and work for human rights. He lectured, wrote articles and an autobiography, and kept his membership in the Communist Party. His wife died in 1988, and he died in 1999.