K.W. Lee, a pioneering Asian American journalist whose reporting led to the release of a Korean immigrant on death row in California, and who covered the Koreatown community targeted in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, died on March 8 at his home in Sacramento. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughters, Sonia Cook and Diana Regan.
Mr. Lee was an immigrant who found his way to West Virginia in the 1950s, beginning an extraordinarily broad journalism career by covering election fraud and poverty in Appalachia.
His articles for The Sacramento Union in the 1970s about the death-row inmate Chol Soo Lee were photocopied and passed around by social workers, students and grandmothers in various Asian communities — Korean, Chinese, Filipino — uniting them in a movement to free him. It was an early example of political activism based on a shared Asian American identity.
Mr. Lee was the editor of the English-language edition of Korea Times in Los Angeles when violence erupted in April 1992, after the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a Black man. More than 2,000 Korean-owned businesses, many in or adjacent to poor Black neighborhoods, were damaged, representing half of the destruction in the citywide riots.
Mr. Lee described the complex roots of the tensions between Korean and African American residents. “To Korean newcomers,” he wrote in an anguished editorial, “it is a sobering reminder that they have replaced their Jewish counterparts as a scapegoat for all the ills, imagined or real, of the impoverished, crime-ravaged Black districts.”
He also accused the mainstream media of sensationalizing those tensions, which he said fed stereotypes of rude and greedy immigrant store owners and fueled the violence against them.
“Shoplifting and racial threats and harassments are part of the daily life of almost every Korean American merchant in inner cities,” he wrote.
His coverage sought to humanize Korean immigrants, and to build a bridge across racial and ethnic lines.
Mr. Lee, who was sometimes described as the dean of Asian American journalism, took a top job in the so-called ethnic press after years as an investigative reporter at mainstream newspapers, most notably The Sacramento Union, which he joined in 1970. There, he exposed corruption in California’s state government, documenting, among other things, how lawmakers secretly rewarded themselves with lavish pensions.
“He was appalled by corruption. It angered him,” Ken Harvey, his editor at The Union, told The Sacramento Bee in 1994.
Mr. Lee went on to write more than 100 articles exposing problems with the jury conviction of Chol Soo Lee, who had been brought to the U.S. from Seoul at age 12, in the murder of a Chinese gang leader in San Francisco. After he was found guilty in 1974 and given a life sentence, he killed another inmate in a knife fight — he said it was self-defense — and landed on death row at San Quentin prison.
“Long isolated and removed from the fragmented Korean community, Lee has maintained his innocence,” Mr. Lee wrote in one article. “Few have listened to his muffled cry for justice. Help, if any, came too little and too late.”
His reporting identified flaws in the original conviction, which raised questions about the difficulty of identifying suspects across racial lines. Although the murder took place during daylight hours in Chinatown, the only eyewitnesses the police found to testify were white tourists. The arresting officer identified Chol Soo Lee as “Chinese.”
“The case deeply resonated with a lot of Asian Americans across different ethnic groups because they had been feeling this racism, this discrimination, feeling not fully humanized in American society,” Julie Ha, a director of the documentary “Free Chol Soo Lee” (2022), said in an interview.
Supporters protested outside courthouses and raised money for a legal defense.
At a retrial in 1982, Chol Soo Lee was acquitted of the Chinatown murder. His conviction in the prison-yard stabbing death was plea-bargained the next year, and he walked free after nearly a decade in prison.
Between Chol Soo Lee and himself, Mr. Lee saw a “very thin line,” he later said. He credited his years of reporting on the case with an awakening of his latent Korean identity.
Mr. Lee left mainstream newspapering to work in the Korean American press. In 1979 he was a founder of the short-lived Koreatown Weekly, in Los Angeles, and in 1990 he became the editor of Korea Times’s English edition.
“He realized that the stories of Korean Americans were largely unknown — we were an invisible minority,” said Ms. Ha, who was an intern at Korea Times under Mr. Lee.
Former staff members of Korea Times paid tribute to Mr. Lee in “Sa I Gu: Korean and Asian American Journalists Writing Truth to Power,” a 2023 book published by the U.C.L.A. Asian American Studies Center. (“Sa i gu” is the Korean American term for the 1992 Los Angeles riots, based on the digits 4-2-9, for April 29, when the violence began.)
“Mr. Lee was genetically drawn to the downtrodden,” John Lee, one of the book’s contributors, wrote in an email, adding that K.W. Lee was known for many aphorisms, among them “Follow the smell.”
Kyung Won Lee was born on June 1, 1928, in Kaesong, in what is now North Korea, the youngest of seven children of Hyung Soon Lee and Soon Bok Kim. His father owned a confectionery factory, but the family sold it to win his release after he was detained for his protest in 1919 of the Japanese occupation of Korea.
Against his parents’ wishes, Kyung Won volunteered for a Japanese air cadet corps unit during World War II and trained as a flight radar operator, but he avoided deployment because of Japan’s surrender in 1945. He immigrated to the United States in 1950, six months before the outbreak of the Korean War, and settled in Tennessee. He later enrolled at West Virginia University, where he graduated with a B.S. in journalism in 1953.
His first newspaper job was at The Kingsport Times-News, in Tennessee, in 1956. Two years later, he was hired by The Charleston Gazette, in the West Virginia capital. The paper sent him to Mingo County, deep in Appalachia, to write about the political and economic influence of King Coal.
His muckraking upset local officials. They called the paper’s newsroom and told his editors, “Don’t send that Chinaman back down here,” Mr. Lee recalled in an interview with WVU magazine, an alumni publication, in 2017.
In 1959, he married Peggy Flowers, an emergency room nurse he had met on the job in Charleston. She died in 2011. In addition to their daughters, Ms. Cook and Ms. Regan, he is survived by a son, Shane Lee; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Liver disease ran in Mr. Lee’s birth family. Both of his parents and all six siblings died of it, Ms. Cook said. During the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, he edited Korea Times in English from the hospital room where he was awaiting a liver transplant.
The lifesaving transplant came through. Later that year, when he received the John Anson Ford award from the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, he said in his acceptance speech that his new liver could have come from a Black, white or Asian donor.
“What does it matter?” he said. “We are all entangled in an unbroken human chain of interdependence and mutual survival. And what really matters is that we all belong to each other during our earthly passage.”
