K.W. Lee
K. W. Lee (short for Kyung Won Lee) is a Korean American journalist who became the first Asian immigrant to work for mainstream daily publications in the continental United States. Lee is also the founding president of the Korean American Journalists Association.
Lee was born in 1928 at Kaesong, North Korea and attended Korea University in Seoul, South Korea. In 1950, he immigrated to the United States and studied journalism at West Virginia University. After receiving a master's degree from the University of Illinois in 1955, he embarked on an extraordinary career with daily newspapers such as the Kingsport Times in Tennessee and the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia. He has won numerous professional honors, including awards from the National Headliners Club, the AP News Executive Council, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Over the decades, Lee has covered important social issues such 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 writing an investigative series on the conviction of immigrant Chol Soo Lee for a 1973 San Francisco Chinatown gangland murder which became the basis of the 1989 film True Believer, starring James Woods and Robert Downey Jr. His series of 120 articles over five years led to a new trial, eventual acquittal and release of the prisoner from San Quentin's Death Row.
In 1979, Lee founded the Koreatown Weekly, the first national English-language Korean American newspaper. In 1990, during rising tensions between African Americans and Korean Americans, he launched and edited the Korea Times' English Edition from Los Angeles, with an internship program for both Asian Americans and other minorities.
Since entering semi-retirement, Lee has lectured on investigative journalism in communities of color throughout the University of California system. He also continues to serve on the editorial board of ColorLines Magazine and has freelanced as a columnist for Currents, Korea Times Bi-lingual Edition, and KoreAm Journal.
(biography from Wikipedia; photo courtesy of CommonKorea)
