photo of Ina Sugihara, New York CORE

photo of Ina Sugihara, New York CORE

New York CORE, asian-american activists

This is a 1953 photo of Ina Sugihara, New York CORE. A Nisei like Yuri Kochiyama, she somehow managed to escape being forced into the internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII*.

Sugihara was one of the early members of New York CORE that met in the Harlem Ashram along with Jim Peck and James Farmer
in the early 1940's. Farmer, rather than stay at the Ashram where he had been living, lived with Sugihara and her boyfriend in downtown Manhattan for a short period.

She was also active in the NAACP as early as the mid 1940's and wrote for its magazine 'The Crisis'.
She is significant because she speaks to the existence of Asian American members in CORE and the civil rights movement as early as the 1940’s.

She later married Bill Jones, a Black member of New York CORE.


The man standing next to her in the photo is identified as Charles Crawford.
*http://www.crmvet.org/nars/orallist.htm

Chicago Defender, Apr 11, 1953

Chicago Defender

Apr 11, 1953

Washington, DC, 1953