What: A Conversation on the Media and Race Relations with K.W. Lee, Journalist and Activist
When: Wednesday, February 1, 4:00-6:00p.m. Reception to follow talk and Q & A
Where: Bender Room, 5th Floor, Bing Wing, Green Library
Include: Kindly forward this invitation to all who might be interested.
On Wednesday, February 1, 2012, at 4:00 p.m., the Stanford Libraries, in conjunction with Asian-American Studies, the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the Center for East-Asian Studies, will host a talk by K.W. Lee, journalist and activist titled "A Conversation on the Media and Race Relations with K.W. Lee, Journalist and Activist."
Considered the godfather of Asian American journalism, K.W. (short for Kyung Won) Lee’s illustrious career as the first Asian immigrant to work for mainstream daily publications in the continental United States has profoundly shaped the Korean American community's consciousness and activism.
A native of Kaesong, North Korea, Lee attended Korea University and studied journalism at West Virginia University and the University of Illinois. In 1955 he started a 45-year-career with dailies in Tennessee, West Virginia and California — much of the last two decades with The Sacramento Union, where he was in charge of investigative coverage and an internship program. He has won 29 professional awards, including those from the National Headliners Club (twice), the AP News Executive Council (three times), and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He was the first recipient of the Asian American Journalists Association's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. In 1997, he was inducted into the Newseum's Journalism History Gallery. In 2000, he was profiled in “Crusaders, Scoundrels, Journalists: The Newseum's Most Intriguing Newspeople,” under the category of “barrier breakers.”
Lee has covered such issues as civil rights struggles in the South in the early 1960s, massive vote buying practices in southern West Virginia and the plight of Appalachian coal miners. Lee is best known for authoring an investigative series on the 1974 San Francisco Chinatown gangland murder conviction of immigrant Chol Soo Lee, upon which the 1989 film True Believer (starring James Woods and Robert Downey, Jr.) was based. His five-year-long coverage with more than 120 articles led to a new trial and an eventual acquittal and release of the prisoner from San Quentin's Death Row.
In 1979, Lee founded the first national English-language Korean American newspaper, Koreatown Weekly, chronicling the early years of the post-World War II Korean immigration. In 1990, K.W. established the English Edition to the Korea Times in Los Angeles. During this crucial time in Korean American history, K.W. already sensed the escalating tensions between African American customers and Korean American merchants in an inner city that had been neglected and abandoned. When Los Angeles erupted in flames on April 29, 1992, K.W.’s premonitions and worst fears came true. As the Korean American community experienced a second victimization by mainstream media’s insensitive portrayal of sa-i-gu (4-2-9 in Korean), ethnic publications like the Korea Times English Edition became all the more important in providing fair coverage of its community, as well as becoming its mouthpiece to the outside world.
In semi-retirement, Lee freelances and lectures on investigative journalism in communities of color throughout the University of California system and is working on several book projects book projects, including Lonesome Journey: the Korean American Century — A Korean Oral History, a collection of oral histories from the earliest wave of Korean immigrants and Witnessing a Defining Moment for Korean American Diaspora: Children of Sa-I-Gu (April 29, 1992) Remember, a multi-racial anthology.
For more information please contact Ben Stone (bstone@stanford.edu)