Kyungwon Lee, also known as K.W. Lee, was born in 1928 in Kaesong, North Korea and received his education at Korea University. When he immigrated to the United States, he began to study journalism at West Virginia University and received his master’s degree at the University of Illinois in 1955. Lee has covered a variety of social justice issues, most notably the hardships of Appalachian coal miners who were exposed to the black lung disease, the civil rights movements during the Jim Crow Era in the South, and the exoneration of wrongly convicted Chol Soo Lee from the San Quentin Death Row.
Lee founded the Koreatown Weekly, the first English Language Korean American publication, and also established the English edition of the Korea Times which informed many 1.5 and second generation Korean Americans during the Los Angeles Riots.
Currently retired, Lee is now living in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, three children, and five grandchildren. In 2003, a nonprofit organization called the KW Lee Center for Leadership was founded by Do Kim to empower the Korean American Youth. Every summer, for the past seven years, the KW Lee Center for Leadership has held their Korean American Youth Leaders in Training (KAYLT) summer internship program with nine high school and nine college interns. During the program, they arrive at Safe Havan Forest near Big Bear for a Sa-i-gu Retreat with KW Lee as their guest speaker. During this time, students have the honor to talk with the first Asian American Journalist himself.
Yegina Whang, a rising senior at Van Nuys high school, the editor in chief of the Van Nuys Journalism class, and KAYLT alumni said, “Meeting KW Lee was an inspiration. During the Sa-i-gu retreat, he not only taught me about being a great journalist but also being a leader in my community.” Brian Oh, a rising sophomore at Harvard University and KAYLT alumni astonishingly mentioned, “My first impression of KW Lee was that he’s truly a remarkable man, with a voice of authority that captures the attention of people around him. As people talked to him, he always has something important to tell others, to question the norms of society, and to not settle until issues are resolved.”
When asked about the upcoming generation of Korean Americans, Lee replied, “We can have a clean start with our generation. You are equipped with the knowledge and have been exposed to every ethnicity. We have many opportunities and with [modern] technology there is no excuse.”
Daniel Lee
Daniel Kangmin Lee is a 12th grader at LACES High School and a returning student editor for the JSR program.
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