Biography
Karl Yoneda was a Japanese-American Communist and labor organizer active on the California waterfront and in the fields. In 1929, protesting the visit of a Japanese naval training ship to San Pedro harbor, he was arrested with fellow Communist Tetsuji Horiuchi and held for three days on suspicion of violating California's criminal-syndicalism law. He went on to organize agricultural and longshore workers through the 1930s and was repeatedly arrested; though a Communist opponent of Japanese militarism, he was later incarcerated with his family at the Manzanar concentration camp during the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, from which he volunteered for the U.S. Army. He was the husband of the labor-defense organizer Elaine Black Yoneda.
