His reporting sought to humanize and unite Asian Americans. It also led to the release of a Korean immigrant on death row.
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.