Aki Kurose (11 February 1925 – 24 May 1998) was an American teacher and social-justice activist who helped establish Washington state's first Head Start program and worked to increase access to education and affordable housing, particularly among low-income and minority families.
She is the namesake of a middle school, a low-income housing community and a peace garden in Seattle, and the local chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League awards the Aki Kurose Memorial Scholarship each year.
Her parents had immigrated separately – her father Harutoshi arriving from Miyagi prefecture seeking work, her mother Murako from Kumamoto to study – and met through mutual friends in Berkeley, California.
)[3] From an early age, Kurose was encouraged to think outside expected gender roles by her parents' egalitarian and nontraditional relationship: Her mother obtained an engineer's license, operated the boiler room and furnace, and performed general maintenance around the building, while her father would bake jelly rolls every Friday evening for get-togethers with friends and neighbors.
[5] She later recalled brushing off her father's worries of trouble, unconcerned as she and her siblings were American citizens – but at school the next day, she was reminded of her "Japaneseness" and unequal status when a teacher told her, "You people bombed Pearl Harbor.
[4] In 1950, Kurose had their first child (Hugo, named after Junks' older brother, who had been forcibly conscripted into the Japanese army and died in the Pacific Theater of World War II), and the new family moved back to Seattle soon after.
Discriminatory real estate practices, combined with a shortage of available housing, made it difficult to find a new home, so the family stayed with Kurose's parents until they were able to move into their own place.
The local electrical and construction unions would not admit Japanese Americans, so Junks, an electrician, was unable to find work for some time before eventually taking a job as a Boeing machinist.
[1] Influenced by the discrimination she and her husband faced during their search for a home, Kurose became involved in the open housing movement in the 1950s, working first with the AFSC and later, in the 1960s, joining the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
[2] When students of color were bused to Laurelhurst from the city's central area beginning in 1978, Kurose worked to ease their integration into the school and push her fellow teachers to promote a multicultural curriculum.