Kiyoshi Kuromiya

Who was Kiyoshi Kuromiya?

Kiyoshi Kuromiya was an author and civil and social justice advocate. He was born in a Japanese American internment camp on May 9, 1943 in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. He died on the night of May 10, 2000, due to complications from AIDS.

In the 1950s, Steven Kiyoshi Kuromiya lived with his father and mother and younger sister in Monrovia, California, a suburb of Los Angeles in the east San Gabriel Valley. In 1961, he graduated with honors from Monrovia High School, where he was active in the Scholarship Society and the Science Club. He was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania.

He was a committed civil rights and anti-war activist. He was also one of the founders of Gay Liberation Front - Philadelphia and served as an openly gay delegate to the Black Panther Convention that endorsed the gay liberation struggle. Kuromiya was an assistant of Martin Luther King Jr. and took care of King's children immediately following his assassination.

To protest of the use of napalm in Vietnam in 1968, he announced that a dog would be burned alive in front of the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt Library.