Karl Yoneda

Karl Yoneda
At Manzanar internment camp, 1942 (Photo: Dorothea Lange)
Born	Goso Yoneda 1906 Glendale, California
Died	1999 (aged 92–93)
Known for	International Longshore and Warehouse Union Communist Party organizer

Karl Gozo Yoneda (Japanese: 米田剛三, 1906–1999) was a Japanese American activist, union organizer, World War II veteran and author. He played a substantial role in the founding of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

Born in Glendale, California in 1906 to Japanese immigrants, Hideo and Kazu. In 1913, Yoneda's father, now diagnosed with tuberculosis, took the family to Japan to live in their native village just outside Hiroshima. His father died two years later, leaving his mother to raise him and his two sisters.

After World War I, Yoneda went to high school in Hiroshima. When he was 15, he organized a strike among the delivery boys of the powerful Chugoku Shimbun newspaper. The company had increased the delivery routes without increasing pay.

Such experiences led Yoneda to progressive ideas. He began reading the works of anarchists and socialists such as Karl Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Bakunin, and the blind anarchist poet Vasili Eroshenko, whom he hitch-hiked to meet in Beijing when he was 16 years old. He stayed with Eroshenko two months and went back to Japan. There, he participated in workers strikes and began publishing a journal for poor farmers, Tsuchi. For that, he was beaten and thrown into jail.

In 1926, Yoneda returned to the U.S. rather than be drafted into the imperial army. On entering the U.S., although he was an American citizen carrying his birth certificate, he was detained at the Immigration Detention House on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay for two months.

He changed his name to Karl to honor Karl Marx and began working as a dish and window washer in Los Angeles for $5 a day. He became involved with the Communist Party and the Los Angeles Japanese Workers Association. About that period, he wrote: