K.W. Lee, known as the ‘godfather of Asian American journalism,’ dies

K.W. Lee, a pioneering Korean American journalist credited with sparking a movement to free a wrongfully convicted Korean immigrant from death row and inspiring a legion of journalists and activists, has died. He was 96.

Lee died from natural causes on March 8, surrounded by his family in Sacramento. Lee became the first Korean immigrant in the continental U.S. to work at a major mainstream newspaper when he was hired by the Kingsport Times-News in Tennessee in 1956.

Known as the “godfather of Asian American journalism,” he collected accolades for his work and became a vocal advocate for Asian American visibility in media.

“My dad was always curious about people’s backgrounds, eagerly asking our friends and acquaintances about their family history and heritage,” said his daughter, Diana Regan. “He genuinely wanted to hear everyone’s story.”

Lee pursued stories and investigations with a doggedness in the South and later on the West Coast, revealing poverty and corruption in small towns in West Virginia and misuse of taxpayer dollars in Sacramento. He investigated the 1974 conviction of Chol Soo Lee, a Korean American immigrant accused of murdering a known gang member in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Lee pursued the case for six months for the Sacramento Union and wrote two front-page stories in which he described Chol Soo Lee as a troubled young man “betrayed by the well-meaning system which has swallowed up the boy in the name of Americanization.”

His second article looked at all the errors in Chol Soo’s murder trial and sought to question his conviction. Around the same time, Chol Soo Lee was being tried for a second murder in prison, which he claimed was out of self-defense. He was convicted, however, and sentenced to death. K.W. Lee’s 1978 articles about the Chinatown murder sparked a pan-Asian American movement and initiated the Chol Soo Lee Defense Committee. Chol Soo Lee was acquitted in 1982.

K.W. Lee would go on to write more than 100 articles about Chol Soo Lee’s case, leaving the Sacramento Union to follow the story through his newspaper start-up, the Koreatown Weekly in Los Angeles. The paper served as a way to write about Koreans, who he felt were not fairly covered in media.

Julie Ha, who co-directed the Emmy-awarding winning documentary “Free Chol Soo Lee,” said Lee saw parallels between himself and Chol Soo Lee. Both were immigrants from Korea, yet their paths diverged.

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Chol Soo Lee’s case awakened the journalist’s own Korean identity, and he considered covering the story his greatest journalistic accomplishment, Ha said. The documentary won the 2024 Emmy for historical documentary.

K.W. Lee was a passionate, loud journalist Ha first met as a high school graduate in the summer of 1990 while interning at the Korea Times English Edition. He dropped F-bombs frequently and once laughed so hard he fell off his chair, she said. He often moved with urgency, she said, pushing young journalists like her to try to keep up.

“It’s that kind of journalism that those of us who have had the privilege to do are so inspired by,” Ha said. “He didn’t just inspire journalists but people of conscience who wanted to do their part in making this world a more fair, just society for all.”

Lee was born on June 1, 1928, in Kaesong, present-day North Korea, the youngest of seven children. His given name was Kyung Won Lee. He grew up believing his father was a poor street peddler. It wasn’t until his father’s death that Lee learned his father had been from the upper-middle class until he was jailed for protesting against the Japanese government.

Lee was the first recipient of the Asian American Journalists Assn.’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987 and the first Asian American journalist to receive the Freedom Forum’s Free Spirit Award in 1994. His journey in the U.S. began in his early 20s when he arrived in 1950 to study journalism at West Virginia University and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Sojin Kim, now a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, began creating archives of Lee’s life when it appeared his health was failing. She earned a grant from UCLA, spent a week in Rancho Cordova interviewing him and learned his immigrant story echoed her own Korean parents’ origin story.

His passion, she figures, could be traced to his family being treated as second-class citizens in their own country under Japanese occupation. Lee was at one point forced to adopt a Japanese name and learn the language. He also attended a Japanese military school that trained kamikaze fighter pilots, where he was bullied for being Korean. After he left the school, he was shunned by other Koreans for training with the Japanese, she said.

“He probably always felt like he was always going to be on the side of an underdog,” Kim said. “He empathized and understood other people who didn’t have access to power or means.”

While working at the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, he met his wife, Peggy Flowers, an emergency room nurse at Charleston General Hospital. He wrote stories that uncovered local government corruption. In one series, he spent four days living with struggling families to humanize the lives of people in Appalachia.

By the time he arrived at the now-defunct Sacramento Union in 1970 as the newspaper’s chief investigative reporter, he had gained a reputation for doggedness. The paper ran a radio ad that declared: “K.W. Lee … digging, probing, tackling the bureaucracy, infiltrating the unknown!”

While working in Los Angeles, he sought to build community between Korean and Black residents. After the Koreatown Weekly folded, he ran the Korea Times English Edition. In April 1992, after the Rodney King beating and the L.A. riots, Lee was hospitalized with a failing liver, yet he managed to edit stories and write an editorial.

He partnered with other ethnic media and exchanged articles with the L.A Sentinel. His work resonated deeply with the fight for civil rights, which reminded him of life under Japanese occupation, Ha said.

He once told her that he believed oppressed people had a type of “telepathy” that bonded them all together, she said. He believed people should be seen as they fully are, she said, “full human context, warts and all.”

In a 1992 speech, he spoke about his belief in humankind.

“We are all entangled in an unbroken human chain of interdependence and mutual survival,” he said, “and what really matters is that we all belong to each other during our earthly passage.”

Do Kim, a civil rights attorney in Koreatown, named the K.W. Lee Center for Leadership in 2003 after his mentor, because he and the other co-founders were most inspired by Lee’s life and work. Lee would come down once a summer to speak to students. Do Kim said his family kept a guest room that was known as “K.W.’s room” for his frequent visits.

“He loved the center, the young people that came through, the mission of it,” Do Kim said. “We wanted to build leaders that followed in K.W.’s footsteps.”

Lee’s daughter, Sonia Cook, said her father helped her understand sacrifice and loss. Every year at the K.W. Lee Center for Leadership annual gala, she recalled, he would recognize the parents of Eddie Lee, an 18-year-old killed while defending his Koreatown neighborhood during the L.A. riots.

“He did that so no one would ever forget the sacrifice and loss they endured,” Cook said.