KW Lee, a pioneering Asian-American journalist who led to the release of Korean immigrants on California's death row inmates and covered the Koreatown community that targeted the 1992 Los Angeles riots, passed away on March 8th at his home in Sacramento. He was 96 years old.
His death was confirmed by his daughters Sonia Cook and Diana Regan.
Lee was an immigrant who found his way to West Virginia in the 1950s and began a very broad journalistic career by covering election fraud and poverty in Appalachia.
His article in the Sacramento Union in the 1970s united the death row prisoner, Chol Soo-Lee, social workers, students and grandmothers (Korean, Chinese, Japanese) in a move to free him. This was an early example of political activity based on shared Asian American identity.
Lee was the editor of the English version of Los Angeles' Korean era when violence broke out in April 1992. More than 2,000 South Korean-owned businesses are adjacent to poor black neighborhoods, but more than 2,000 companies have been damaged, representing half of the destruction of riots throughout the city.
Lee described the complicated roots of tensions between Koreans and African-American residents. “To a Korean newcomer,” he wrote to a painful editor:
He also accused the mainstream media of sensationalizing those tensions, saying he gave the stereotypes of rude and greedy immigrant store owners and promoted violence against them.
“Shoplifting, racial threats and harassment are part of the daily lives of almost every Korean-American merchant in the city center,” he writes.
His reporting has attempted to humanize Korean immigrants and build bridges across race and ethnic boundaries.
Lee, who is sometimes called the dean of Asian American Journalism, did his best job in so-called ethnic reporting years later as an investigative reporter for the mainstream newspaper, particularly the Sacramento Union, who joined in 1970.
“He was appalled by corruption. It made him mad,” union editor Ken Harvey told Sacramento Bee in 1994.
Lee has continued to write more than 100 articles revealing the issue with the conviction of Chul Su-Lee's ju judge who was brought to the US from Seoul at the age of 12 for the murder of a Chinese gang leader in San Francisco. After he was convicted in 1974 and given life in prison, he killed another inmate in a knife fight – he said it was self-defense and landed on death row in San Quentin Prison.
“Le, who has been isolated and removed from the fragmented Korean community, has maintained his innocence,” Lee wrote in one article. “Leah, few have heard his muffled screams.
His report identifies flaws in the original conviction, raising questions about the difficulty of identifying interracial suspects. The murder occurred in Chinatown during the day, but the only witnesses found police to testify were white tourists. The arrest officials identified Chul Soo-Lee as “Chinese.”
“Because of this racism, this discrimination felt that it was not completely humanized in American society, and therefore resonated deeply with many Asian Americans from various ethnic groups,” the director of the documentary Free Chol Soo Lee (2022) said in an interview.
Supporters protested outside the courts and raised money for legal defense.
In a retrial in 1982, Chol Soo-Lee was acquitted of the Chinatown murder. His conviction in prison yard stab wounds was pleaded the following year and walked freely in prison for nearly a decade.
He said that between Chul Soo-Lee and himself, Lee saw “a very thin line.” He believes in years of reporting on this case, with the awakening of his potential Korean identity.
Lee left mainstream newspapers and worked for the Korean-American press. In 1979 he was the founder of the short-lived Koreatown Weekly in Los Angeles, and in 1990 he became the editor of the English version of the Korean Times.
“He realized that Korean American stories were little known. We were an invisible minority,” said HA, a Korean intern under Lee.
Former Korean Times staff paid tribute to Lee in his 2023 book “Korean and Asian American Journalists Write Power,” published by the UCLA Center for Asian American Studies. (“sa i gu” is the Korean-American term for the 1992 Los Angeles riots, based on the number 4-2-9 on April 29th, when the violence began.)
“Mr. Lee was genetically attracted to those who were oppressed,” wrote John Lee, one of the book's contributors, in an email, adding that KW Lee “follows the smell” known for many sayings.
Kyoung Wong Lee was born in Kaesung on June 1, 1928, and is now North Korea, and is soon the youngest of Lean's seven children, and soon Bok Kim. His father owned a confectionery factory, but the family sold it to win his release after being detained in 1919 for protests in the Korean occupation.
Contrary to his parents' wishes, Kyon volunteered for the Japanese Air Cadets squad during World War II and trained as a flytrader operator, but in 1945 he avoided the deployment due to Japan's surrender. He later enrolled at West Virginia University and graduated in 1953 with BS in Journalism.
His first newspaper job was in 1956 at Kingsport Times News, Tennessee. Two years later, he was hired by the Charleston Gazette, the capital of West Virginia. This paper sent him to Mingo County, deep in Appalachia, and wrote about the political and economic impacts of the coal king.
His MacRake disrupted local officials. They called the paper's newsroom and told his editor, “Don't bring Chinaman back here.”
In 1959 he married Peggy Flower, an emergency room nurse whom he met during his work in Charleston. She passed away in 2011. In addition to his daughters Cook and Regan, he was survived by his son Shane Lee. Six grandchildren. and three great grandchildren.
Liver disease ran at Mr. Lee's birth home. His parents and all six siblings died from it, Cook said. During the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, he edited the Korean Times in English from a hospital room awaiting a liver transplant.
A life-saving transplant has passed. Later that year, when he received the John Anson Ford Award from the Los Angeles County Relations Commission, he said in his acceptance speech that his new liver might come from a black, white, or Asian donor.
“What is that important?” he said. “We are all caught up in an unbroken human chain of interdependence and mutual survival. And what really matters is that we all belong to each other between our earthly passages.”
