Wayne Lum was a close friend and associate of Yuri Kochiyama and a supporter of Revolution/revcom.us, who sought to understand the roots of this vicious system of oppression and exploitation.  Below is tribute written by Steve Yip when books from his book collection was donated by Gloria Lum to Revolution Books NYC.  Steve Yip and Sidd Joag of Interstitial Media — both who were active with the David Wong campaign — will be crafting a more in-depth appreciation of Wayne’s political contributions.

Wayne was an Asian American radical political activist inspired by the Black liberation struggle, who, in the 1990s, focused on essential political prisoner and politicized prisoner cases that impacted the Asian American community.  He was a driving force in the David Wong Support Committee, Asians for Mumia, and the Justice for Chaplain James Yee case, as well as supporting the case of Lt. Ehren Watada, the first army officer to refuse deployment to Iraq in 2006.  He was also a strong supporter of the work of the October 22nd Coalition to STOP Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation, which I was a key activist and organizer.

The David Wong Support Committee played a defining role in the 1990’s in driving radical political activism in the Asian American community in the East and West Coasts.  David Wong was a Chinese immigrant inmate who was scapegoated for an upstate New York prison murder he did not commit.  This was a complicated case involving a major cover-up and missing witnesses.  After many years of community organizing and digging through the legal morass of a cover-up, David Wong was eventually freed and exonerated of all charges of murder.

The Justice for Chaplain James Yee case concerned a Muslim army chaplain (captain) at Guantanamo Bay, who was held as a prisoner accused of sedition, tortured, and then freed, without any evidence being brought against him.