Korean-American journalist KW Lee is believed to have freed misconducted Korean immigrants from death row inmates, sparking a movement to inspire a corps of journalists and activists. He was 96 years old.
Lee died of natural causes on March 8th and was surrounded by Sacramento families. Lee became the first Korean immigrant in the US to work in mainstream newspapers when he was hired by the Charleston Gazette in 1958.
Known as “The Godfather of Asian American Journalism,” he has garnered praise for his work and became an advocate for the voice of Asian American visibility in the media.
“My father has always been interested in people’s backgrounds and has been enthusiastic about his friends and acquaintances about the history and heritage of his family,” said his daughter Diana Regan. “He really wanted to hear everyone.”
Lee pursues narrative and investigation with dog stubbornness on the south and the west coast, revealing poverty and corruption in a small town in West Virginia, and the misuse of Sacramento taxpayer dollars. He investigated the conviction of Chol Su-Lee, a Korean-American immigrant accused of murdering a known gang member in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Lee pursued the lawsuit for six months for the Sacramento Union, writing two homepage stories. There, Chul Soo-Lee described him as a troubled young man who was “betrayed by a well-meaning system that swallowed the boy in the name of Americanization.”
His second article examined all the mistakes in Chol Su’s murder trial and tried to question his beliefs. At about the same time, Chol Soo-Lee was on trial for his second prison murder, but he claimed it was out of self-defense. However, he was convicted and sentenced to death. A 1978 KW Lee article on the Chinatown murder sparked the Pan-Asian American movement and launched the Chol Soo Lee Defense Committee. Chol Soo Lee was acquitted in 1982.
KW Lee has written over 100 articles on the Chol Su-Lee incident and followed the story through Koreatown Weekly in Los Angeles, the Sacramento Union’s startup. This paper served as a way to write about Koreans.
Julie Ha, who co-directed the Emmy Award-winning documentary Free Chol Soo Lee, said he saw similarities between Lee and Chol Soo Lee. Both were immigrants from Korea, but their paths diverged.
The Chul Soo-Lee incident awakened the journalist’s own Korean identity, and he thought of the story covering the greatest journalistic achievements, Ha said. The documentary won the 2024 Emmy Award for its historic documentary.
KW Lee was a passionate, loud journalist who first met as a high school graduate while internship in the Korean Times English edition in the summer of 1990. He frequently dropped F bombs and laughed so hard that he once fell out of his chair, she said. He often moved in urgently, she said, striving to catch up with young journalists like her.
“That kind of journalism is so inspired by our people who had privileges,” Ha said. “He not only inspires journalists, but also inspires people of conscience who wanted to do their part to make this world even more equitable.
Lee was born on June 1, 1928 in what is now North Korea. His given name was Kyon Won Lee. He grew up believing that his father was a poor street peddler. It was until his death that Lee was imprisoned for his father being imprisoned for protesting the Japanese government, but it was until his death that his father learned that his father came from the middle class.
Lee was the first recipient of the 1987 Asian American Journalist Assn’s Lifetime Achievement Award and was an Asian American journalist who won the 1994 Freedom Forum’s Free Spirom Award. His journey in the United States began in the early 1950s to study journalism at West Virginia University, the University of Illinois, and Urbana Champagne University.
Now, curator of the Smithsonian facility, Seo Jin Kim began creating an archive of Lee’s life when his health seemed to be failing. She earned a grant from UCLA and spent a week at Rancho Cordoba interviewing him, learning that his immigration story reflected the origins of her own Korean parents.
He believes his passion can be traced to his family, who are treated as second-class citizens in Japan under Japanese occupation. At one point, Lee was forced to adopt a Japanese name and learn the language. He also attended a Japanese military school where he trained pilots of Kamikaze fighter jets who were bullied for being Korean. After he left school, he was shunned by other Koreans for training with the Japanese, she said.
“He probably always felt he was going to be by the underdog’s side all the time,” Kim said. “He empathized and understood other people who had no access to power or means.”
While working at the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, he met his wife Peggy Flowers, a nurse in the emergency room at Charleston General Hospital. He wrote a story that revealed corruption in local governments. In one series, he lived for four days with a family struggling to humanize the lives of the Appalachian people.
By the time he arrived at the now-retired Sacramento Union as the newspaper’s chief investigative reporter in 1970, he had a stubborn reputation. The paper ran a radio ad that declared, “KW Lee… digging, researching, working on the bureaucracy, infiltrating the unknown!”
While working in Los Angeles, he tried to build a community between Koreans and black residents. After Koreatown Weekly collapsed, he ran the Korean Times English Edition. In April 1992, after Rodney Kingbeat and Rawitz, Lee was hospitalized for a liver failure, but he was able to edit the story and write editorials.
He partnered with other ethnic media to exchange articles with La Sentinel. His work resonated deeply with the fight for civil rights, which reminded him of life under Japanese occupation, Ha said.
He once said he believed that there was a type of “telepathy” in which oppressed people unite them, she said. He believed that people should be seen as perfectly the case, she said, “the perfect human context, warts, and everything.”
In his 1992 speech, he spoke about his belief in humanity.
“We are all caught up in an unbroken human chain of interdependence and mutual survival,” he said.
Kim, a civil rights lawyer in Koreatown, was appointed to the KW Lee Leadership Centre in 2003 after his leader. Lee got off once in the summer and talked to the students. Kim said he kept a guest room known as “KW’s Room” for frequent visits by his family.
“He loved the centre, the young people who passed through, the mission of that,” Kim said. “We wanted to build a leader who followed in KW’s footsteps.”
Lee’s daughter, Sonia Cook, said she helped her father understand the sacrifice and loss. Every year at the KW Lee Leadership Annual Gala Center, she would recognize the parents of 18-year-old Eddie Lee who was killed while protecting a Korean neighbour during Rawitt.
“He did that and no one will forget the sacrifices and losses they endured,” Cook said.
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