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Kazu Iijima (1918 - August 26, 2007) was a Japanese American activist and community organizer who was a co-founder of Asian Americans for Action and the United Asian Communities Center. Born Kazuko Ikeda in California, she grew up in Oakland, and attended college at UC Berkeley. She encountered Marxist critiques of racism through her older sister and the Young Communist League at Berkeley, and became involved in radical politics. By 1938, Ikeda helped to form the Oakland Nisei Democratic Club to encourage more Niseis to take up radical responses to working class issues and racism. Ikeda was still living and working in the Bay Area when Japanese Americans on the west coast were subjected to incarceration under Executive Order 9066. She was first at Tanforan Assembly Center, and then Topaz concentration camp in Utah. She married Tak Iijima in Utah as he was joining the U.S. Army, and was released to move to Mississippi with him soon after. After the war, the couple settled in New York City, and began to raise a family. Although Iijima joined the Japanese American Committee for Democracy at that time, it wasn't until the late 1960s that she returned to organizing with the founding of Asian Americans for Action. Along with other Japanese American radicals like Yuri Kochiyama and Minn Matsuda, Iijima built the AAA as a platform for opposing the Vietnam War and for nurturing grassroots Asian American solidarity.