Have you heard about the David Wong Case? This was spurred by the late Yuri Kochiyama, whose work with many Black liberation movement political prisoners, had heard about a Chinese immigrant New York State prison inmate who was wrongly accused for a prison murder he had nothing to do with. Through determined and tenacious work by the David Wong Support Committee (DWSC), after several years of outreach, mobilizations and investigations, Wong was exonerated, released and returned to Hong Kong.

The work to free David Wong was very likely the most important Asian American social justice campaign of the 1990’s (outside of the justice campaigns for Chol Soo Lee or for Vincent Chin). Yuri Kochiyama’s leadership was a significant factor in maintaining the momentum of the David Wong case as it sought social justice traction through several years. Directly related is the unsung work of the late Wayne Lum, a postal worker turned social justice campaign leader, who shepherded these initiatives inspired by Yuri Kochiyama.

The DWSC incubated several other Asian American justice initiatives, e.g. Asians for Mumia Abu-Jamal; Asians for October 22nd National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality; South Asians Against Police Brutality and Racism; the Chaplain James Yee Support Committee (a U.S. army chaplain persecuted and tortured for ‘sedition’ after whistleblowing at Guantanamo Bay); and supporting Hawai’i native Ehren Watada, the first U.S. army officer to refuse duty to the 1st Iraq war — much of which involved intersections with veterans of the Black liberation struggle. This project will involve organizing a documented retrospective among the DWSC activists and its legal team, who are now dispersed throughout the U.S.