Born: 11 February 1923, United States
Died: 7 February 2003
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Noriko Sawada
The following is republished from the Densho Encyclopedia, in line with the Creative Commons licensing. It was written by Patricia Wakida.
Noriko “Nikki” Sawada Bridges Flynn was a San Francisco-based activist who advocated for civil liberties, equality and democracy.
Family Background and Early Life
She was born Noriko Sawada in Gardena (Los Angeles County) on February 11, 1923, to Japanese immigrant parents, Ashiko and Ura Sawada, farmers who grew strawberries and green beans on leased land in Southern California. Her father arrived in the United States in 1901 at the age of twenty-six. After working on railroads and in agriculture as an itinerant laborer for ten years, he had finally saved enough money to get married. Her mother, the daughter of a wealthy rice merchant, was a picture bride who met her husband for the first time when she arrived at the port of San Francisco in 1918. According to an account of her family history that Flynn published in Ms. Magazine in 1980, Flynn’s mother had a difficult past she hoped to leave behind in Japan. At age sixteen, she had gotten pregnant by a neighbor’s son, bringing shame upon her family, but the child died when he was two years old. It was not until her cousin, an acquaintance of Ashiko Sawada’s, who had immigrated to the United States, presented her family with the opportunity to marry and move abroad, that she saw that she would have another chance at life. Flynn’s father had left a first wife behind in Japan in 1901 and since he was not able to send back enough money to support her, the couple divorced in 1909. He labored for ten years on railroads and as a migrant farmworker, saving enough money by 1918 to sponsor a new wife. By then he was forty-six years old and requested an introduction to an older woman, one “who would not be likely to run off with a bachelor younger than he.” She was thirty-six. The couple began a life of farmwork in California and bore two children: a son, who died as an infant, and Noriko, born in 1923.
In 1942, Flynn had just completed her first year at Santa Monica College when her family was forcibly detained at the concentration camp in Poston, Arizona, where they remained for three years. Flynn’s invalid mother required constant attendance, which burdened the nineteen year old to the point of a suicide attempt in camp. After the war, Flynn moved to Berkeley and became politically involved with the AFL-CIO and the Berkeley Interracial Committee, and also worked with the War Relocation Authority to help other Japanese Americans resettle back along the West Coast. For twelve years she assisted Charles Garry, a lawyer whose clients included leading political dissidents and radicals such as Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. She later claimed that her years of incarceration and her realization of the many injustices of American society as a major influence on her decision to become an activist. Flynn would dedicate her life supporting a wide range of causes, including union rights, fair treatment of immigrants and racial, gender and sexual equality.
Marriage and Activism
In the 1950s, Charles Garry introduced her to Harry Bridges, a well-known San Francisco labor leader who helped found the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union, at a cocktail party to raise money for the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union. On December 7, (Pearl Harbor Day) 1958, the two went to Reno, Nevada, intending to get married, unaware that the state still had miscegenation laws in effect. When the clerk refused to issue them a marriage license, the affair became a struggle for their civil liberties. Mr. Bridges protested, saying that his bride was an American, born in the United States, while he was the foreigner. News accounts quoted the clerk as saying, It’s not a matter of where you were born. It’s the blood. It’s against the law here. After much media coverage of the challenge, including an article in Time magazine, they were married on December 11, 1958. The Bridgeses remained married for thirty-one years, a marriage that was built on their passionate political work that including international travel and the chance to meet with world figures such as Nikita Khrushchev and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. They had one child, Katherine Bridges (Wiggins).
Before the war, Flynn had attended one year at Santa Ana Junior College, but her education was cut short suddenly by Executive Order 9066. In 1973, Flynn went back to school when she was fifty years old, enrolling in creative writing courses at San Francisco State. Over the next decade, she wrote three autobiographical pieces; two that were eventually published in national magazines: “Papa Takes a Bride” which appeared in Harper’s and “Memoir of a Japanese Daughter” which was published in Ms. Magazine. Her writing also won accolades; she received the University of Missouri’s “Penny Award” for literature. She was also well-known for her wit and humor, and was proud to have placed one year in the top entries of San Jose State University’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for composition of “the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.”
Redress and Later Life
As the movement in the 1970s and 1980s to address the injustices of the World War II American concentration camps grew, Flynn joined in the efforts for redress and reparations. After the Civil Liberties Act passed in 1988, mandating reparations checks of twenty thousand dollars each to the camp survivors, Flynn used part of these funds to hire a white gardener. Two years later, at the congressional ceremony held in San Francisco, Flynn read a long poem entitled “To Be or Not To Be: There’s No Such Option,” which received an emotional response and she claimed “purged” her. As a core member of the National Japanese American Historical Society based in San Francisco, she was instrumental in planning a landmark exhibition at the Oakland Museum in 1990 titled ” Strength and Diversity: Japanese American Women, 1885-1990 .” Flynn was equally active with the Japanese Women’s Group and the Pacific Asian American Women Bay Area Coalition, which honored her in 1988 with their “Asian Woman Warrior” award.
When she was seventy-two, Flynn married a second time, this time to Ed Flynn, past president of the Pacific Maritime Association and a former political cohort of her first husband, Harry. For the wedding, she purposefully chose to hold the ceremony on May Day (May 1), 1994, also known as the International Workers’ Day, at the Olympic Club because the San Francisco city attorney had recently won a lawsuit against the club, forcing it to admit women as full members.
Flynn was also a passionate advocate in memorializing and continuing her husband Harry Bridges’ legacy and helped endow the Harry Bridges chair on labor at the University of Washington’s Center for Labor Studies and successfully persuaded the San Francisco Port Commission to name the plaza in front of the Ferry Building “Bridges Plaza.”
She died February 7, 2003, in Palo Alto, California.