described as a woman of "complicated political beliefs" and at times "contradictory views" who managed to combine support for both racial integration and separation. She admired Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. Kochiyama supported the Peruvian Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path. She joined a delegation to Peru, organized by the American Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, to gather support for Abimael Guzmán, the imprisoned leader of the Shining Path. Kochiyama stated "[t]he more I read, the more I came to completely support the revolution in Peru." Kochiyama in the mid-1960s joined the Revolutionary Action Movement, a black nationalist organization dedicated to urban guerrilla warfare which was one of the first organizations in the black liberation movement to attempt to construct an ideology based on a synthesis of the thought of Malcolm X, Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong. In 1968 she was one of the few non-blacks invited to join the Republic of New Africa which advocated the establishment of a separate black nation in the Southern United States. Kochiyama joined, and subsequently sided with, an RNA faction which felt that the need to build a separate black nation was even more important than the struggle for civil rights in Northern cities. After Kochiyama became a "citizen" of the RNA she decided to drop her "slave name" Mary and used only the name Yuri. Kochiyama founded and sustained the David Wong Support Committee, which after a fourteen-year battle succeeded in exonerating Wong of the murder of a fellow inmate. Kochiyama wrote letters to, fundraised for, and visited Wong in prison. Kochiyama supported people she saw as political prisoners and victims of FBI oppression. She worked on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an African-American activist sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. She was a friend and supporter of Assata Shakur, an African-American activist and member of the former Black Liberation Army (BLA), who had been convicted of the first-degree murder of a New Jersey State Trooper before escaping from U.S. prison and receiving asylum in Cuba. She stated that to her Shakur was like "the female Malcolm [X] or the female Mumia [Abu-Jamal]." She also supported Marilyn Buck, a feminist poet, who was imprisoned for her participation in Shakur's 1979 prison escape, the 1981 Brink's robbery and the 1983 U.S. Senate bombing. Yuri was also in correspondence with Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, her first teacher in