On June 6, 1964, two hibakusha (atomic bombing sufferers)—playwright Hamai RyūjiFootnote ¹ and Hiroshima News journalist Mitsui Akira—met Black revolutionary Malcolm X in the Harlem home of Japanese American Civil Rights activist Yuri Kochiyama (1921–2014). According to Kochiyama, Malcolm X told them, “You were bombed and have physical scars. We too have been bombed… . We are constantly hit by the bombs of racism (Fujino Reference Fujino2005; Intondi Reference Intondi2015, 81–82).” This essay traces women Civil Rights and antinuclear activists during the early Cold War—both of color and white—who made the meeting possible. Their social and cultural labor formed networks intersecting gender, race, and ethnicity, leading to a more expansive nuclear abolitionist vision that connects a feminist ethics of care (Tronto Reference Tronto1994) with social justice for the purpose of eliminating racism and nuclear weapons.

This vision resonates in Jasmine Owens’s Reference Owens2024 article “The False Equivalency of Nuclear Disarmament and Nuclear Abolition,” which distinguishes between these two modes. Nuclear disarmament remains at the level of national and international relations, failing to connect disarmament with human agency and social justice—especially that concerning the vitality and agency of nuclear-affected communities of color and the environment. Nuclear abolition, on the other hand, views nuclear violence as directly related to systems of oppression (capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy). Abolition seeks to eliminate nuclear weapons and technologies of harm by creating a movement-based “world where community care and cooperation prevail over domination and violence. A world where there are robust systems of accountability, healing, and transformative justice” (Owens Reference Owens2024, para. 15). Recovering women’s labor during the early Cold War as agentic abolitionist praxis provides affirmation for new generations of nuclear abolitionists who are seeking to rebuild intersectional relationships and also recovers vital tools for a more inclusive nuclear abolition movement in the present.

The hibakusha who met Malcolm X were members of the World Peace Study Mission (WPSM), organized by Hiroshima-based Quaker antinuclear activist Barbara Reynolds (1915–1990). In 1964, Reynolds traveled with 25 hibakusha to all nuclear-weapons-holding countries in the world. Dividing into three teams to cover the United States as efficiently as possible, WPSM members converged in New York City before embarking to Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The mission’s complex US logistics were coordinated by three white women: Fay Honey Knopp (1918–1995), Virginia Naeve (1921–2017), and Marjorie Swann (1921–2014) (Applebaum Reference Applebaum2009, 185; Licence and Johnson Reference Licence and Johnsonn.d.; Swann Reference Swann1998).

Swann was a radical pacifist and experienced organizer. In 1942, she helped found the Congress of Racial Equality and in 1957, the Committee on Nonviolent Action (CNVA; Mollin Reference Mollin2006, 26–29). After Swann moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1945, she became friends with Antioch College student Coretta Scott King (Applebaum Reference Applebaum2009, 187; Swann Reference Swann1998). There she also encountered Earle Reynolds, a physical anthropologist, and his wife, Barbara. Barbara would move with Earle to Hiroshima in 1951, where he worked for the US Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. In June 1958, the Reynolds’s defied US military orders and sailed into a nuclear test site in the Marshall Islands in protest of US nuclear testing after meeting with CNVA’s Albert Bigelow and the crew of the “Golden Rule,” who were facing trial for an earlier attempt to sail into the same restricted area. (Bigelow Reference Bigelow1959, 168). In June 1959, Swann trespassed onto one of the first US intercontinental ballistic missile sites in Omaha, Nebraska (Applebaum Reference Applebaum2009, 190), receiving a six-month prison sentence. In summer 1960, she led a training camp culminating in the “Polaris Action” to protest the Polaris nuclear submarine. In 1961, Swann joined the antinuclear organization Women Strike for Peace (Applebaum Reference Applebaum2009, 185).

Fay Honey Knopp and Virginia Naeve were also involved in nonviolence and pacifist movements in the 1930s. Naeve was a pacifist artist who joined Swann’s Polaris Action in 1960. (Walker Reference Walker2024). Similarly, Knopp traveled to Cuba in the 1930s, practiced Ghandian nonviolence (Licence and Johnson Reference Licence and Johnsonn.d.), and became active with the Committee for Nonviolent Action in 1960. In 1961, both Naeve and Knopp joined Women Strike for Peace, which led them to Black Civil Rights activist Clarie Collins Harvey. Harvey, a 1937 graduate of Spelman College and prominent businesswoman, formed Womenpower Unlimited in May 1961 to support incarcerated Freedom Riders in Jackson, Mississippi (Morris Reference Morris2015, 15). From the 1920s, Harvey was immersed in the antiracist work of the YWCA in Atlanta, Georgia, then traveled throughout Europe with progressive Christian organizations.Footnote ² In March 1962, Harvey, Knopp, Naeve, and Scott King traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, for a nuclear disarmament conference. After the conference, Harvey drew Naeve and Knopp to her Civil Rights work in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1964, Harvey’s Womanpower Unlimited became an honorary sponsor of Reynolds’ World Peace Study Mission (Morris Reference Morris2015, 109), and the WPSM’s southern team traveled to Spelman College and other Black churches and schools.

These relationships led WPSM coordinators Knopp, Naeve, and Swann to Yuri Kochiyama. During WWII, Kochiyama was interned for “five months in the horse stables of the Santa Anita ‘assembly center’” and incarcerated in Jerome, Arkansas (Fujino Reference Fujino2005, 59). In 1946, she moved to New York City where her Midtown apartment became the center of a vibrant, interracial community of Japanese Americans, Chinese, Black, Indian, Filipino, and white families (Kochiyama Reference Kochiyama2004, 43). In 1955, Kochiyama interpreted for the ideologically fraught “Hiroshima Maidens Project,” which provided reconstructive surgery to young female Hiroshima hibakusha (Kochiyama Reference Kochiyama2004, 41–42; Miyamoto Reference Miyamoto2015). There she encountered CNVA member Albert Bigelow, whose family hosted one of the women (Naeve Reference Naeve1964, 131). In 1961, Kochiyama invited James Peck to speak at her Harlem apartment (Kochiyama Reference Kochiyama2004, 48). Peck, a CNVA Golden Rule crew member, was arrested with Bigelow in 1958 and joined Bigelow in 1961 as a Freedom Rider. Through Peck, Kochiyama learned of the Harlem Congress of Racial Equality, where she became friends with Malcom X in 1963. (Kochiyama Reference Kochiyama2004, 49). Aware of Kochiyama’s connection to Malcolm X, Knopp contacted her with the hibakushas’ request to meet.

Kochiyama would later view Malcolm X’s June 1964 meeting with Hamai and Mitsui as evidence of his turn to a revolutionary internationalism (Griffith and Quan Reference Griffith and Quan2010). Yet, looking beyond the meeting to recover accounts of women’s social and cultural labor—such as those of Harvey, Kochiyama, Scott King, and their white counterparts, Knopp, Naeve, Reynolds and Swann—during the Civil Rights and early antinuclear movements (Considine Reference Considine2023) can also point scholars and activists toward a more just, caring, and transformative nuclear abolition movement.Footnote ³