K.W. Lee Papers Relating the Chol Soo Lee Case

W. (Kyung Won) Lee, a pioneer Asian American journalist, has worked 40 years as a reporter, editor, and publisher of mainstream dailies and Asian weeklies. He founded and edited Koreatown Weekly, the first national Korean American newspaper (1979-82) and edited The Korea Times weekly English Edition based in Los Angeles (1990-92). KW Lee is considered as the dean of Asian American journalism among his peers, and best known as the Sacramento Union reporter whose investigative series on the 1973 San Francisco Chinatown gangland murder case led to the retrial and eventual acquittal of convict Chol Soo Lee from San Quentin's death row. The case was later depicted in the Hollywood movie, True Believer. In 1997 he was inducted into the Newseum's Journalism History Gallery in Arlington, Va. In recent years Lee has served as a special projects advisor at Sacramento's Hearst Corporatation affiliate KCRA-TV. Recently, he has been lecturing a course entitled, "Investigative Journalism and Communities of Color: Exploring California's Pacific Rim Mosaic" at UC-Davis in 1998 fall, and at UCLA, the 1999 and 2000 fall quarters. He is also the subject of the documentary film (K.W. Lee: Worm's-eye View) by Korean American filmmaker Kay Hwangbo. (Biography courtesy of Oberlin Korean Students Association.) You may also view a full biographical timeline for K.W. Lee for more details.

We provide a chronology of the Chol Soo Lee case as a framework for examining the collection of his papers relating to the Chol Soo Lee case.

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