Racial Justice Committee

Susan Ahn Cuddy was the third of five children and eldest daughter of Dosan Ahn Changho and Helen Lee, her parents being the first married Korean immigrants to the United States in 1902. She was born in Los Angeles, CA and as a youth, she played baseball and field hockey. During her time at Los Angeles City College, she played second base for the women’s baseball team. She later graduated from San Diego State University in 1940.

Susan’s father, Dosan, devoted his life to the cause of liberating Korea from Japanese colonization, known as the Korean Independence Movement. The family opened their house, “the Ahn House”, to support others who left Korea, including at one point, Soh Jaipil, who previously was the first Korean to become a naturalized US citizen. Their home later became the headquarters for The Young Korean Academy (Hung Sa Dan), which provided resources to Korean immigrants. During this time in her upbringing, Susan also worked with some of her father’s independence organizations and widely attributed her parents’ commitment and service to the movement as pivotal in the development of her own identity and values. In 1938, Dosan died due to internal injuries related to imprisonment and torture by the Japanese.

Three years after her father’s death, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 and soon thereafter Susan enlisted in the US military, eager to fight against the Japanese. Despite intensely prevalent anti-Asian sentiments and sexism in the armed forces, she became the first Asian American woman in the US Navy in 1942. She was sent to Georgia to learn the flight simulator LINK Trainer program and as an instructor, she taught combat aviator pilots how to shoot down enemy aircrafts. As she worked her way up the Navy chain of command, she eventually became the first female gunnery officer in the Navy, including training how to fire guns that many men had trouble handling.

Susan led a career within the Navy and other government agencies with remarkable achievements as an Asian American woman during that era. She earned the rank of Lieutenant and worked for the US Naval Intelligence and later for the Library of Congress. Her experience within the National Security Agency (NSA) in Washington, DC enabled her to work on many top secret projects with the Department of Defense despite facing suspicion because of her race. She even oversaw a think tank of more than 300 people working in Russia during the Cold War.   

In 1947, she married Irish American Chief Petty Officer, Francis X. "Frank" Cuddy, who also worked with US Naval Intelligence and the NSA. Due to anti-miscegenation laws at the time, there were limited places that would allow their interracial union, so they married at a Navy Chapel in DC. They had two children, Philip "Flip" and Christine.

After a career in government intelligence, Susan returned to Los Angeles in 1959 to spend more time with her children and help manage the family’s restaurant Phil Ahn’s Moongate Restaurant in Panorama City. Susan persisted in fighting for advocacy for Korean Americans, which earned her multiple accolades. In 2003, she was named the Woman of the Year by the State Assembly of California of District 28 in honor of her commitment to public service and the Asian American Justice Center in DC gave her the American Courage Award in 2006.

Susan continued to support her passions in her later life by speaking at Navy and local Korean community events. She even campaigned for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama and her experience as a breast cancer survivor led her to fundraise for the foundation. Susan Ahn Cuddy passed away at her residence in Northridge, CA in 2015, at the age of 100.

Wong Kim Ark
born 1873, date of death unknown

Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants, who were among hundreds of thousands that came to the United States in the mid-1800s seeking a new life and worked by building railroads, farming the growing West, and chasing the prospect of the fortune during the California Gold Rush. During that time, anti-Chinese sentiment manifested as working-class white men blamed Chinese immigrants for taking their jobs and thereby causing the economic financial downturn the country was enduring. Xenophobic attitudes further hardened after the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law that restricted free immigration to the US based on race or nationality and disallowed Chinese immigrants already living in the US to become citizens.

 Wong Kim Ark returned to the US from visiting China and was barred from re-entry on the basis that the child of a Chinese immigrant could not have been a US citizen, as he claimed. Wong filed a lawsuit against the government that eventually led to United States v Wong Kim Ark in 1898, where the US Supreme Court decided for Wong, stating the 14^th Amendment granted that any person born in the US was a US citizen by birth, irrespective of race or the citizenship status of their parents. This landmark case established precedent for future “Birthright Citizenship” immigration cases.

Lili'uokalani
September 2, 1838 - November 11, 1917

Lydia Liliʻu Loloku Walania Kamakaʻeha was the sovereign and only queen regnant of the Kingdom of Hawai`i ruling from January 29, 1891, until the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by a coalition of American businessmen, led by Sanford Dole, on January 17, 1893. The composer of “Aloha `Oe” and numerous other works, she wrote her autobiography Hawai`i’s Story by Hawai`i’s Queen during her imprisonment following the coup.

Liliʻuokalani was born on September 2, 1838, in Honolulu, on the island of O’ahu. While her natural parents were Analea Keohokālole and Caesar Kapa`akea, she was hānai (informally adopted) at birth by Abner Pākī and Laura Kōnia and raised with their daughter Bernice Pauahi Bishop. Baptized as a Christian and educated at the Royal School, she and her siblings and cousins were proclaimed eligible for the throne by King Kamehameha III. She was married to American-born John Owen Dominis, who later became the Governor of O’ahu. The couple had no biological children but adopted several. After the accession of her brother David Kalākaua to the throne in 1874, she and her siblings were given Western style titles of Prince and Princess. In 1877, after her younger brother Leleiohoku II’s death, she was proclaimed heir apparent to the throne.

Liliʻuokalani ascended to the throne on January 29, 1891, nine days after her brother's death. During her reign, she attempted to draft a new constitution which would restore the power of the monarchy and the voting rights of the economically disenfranchised. Threatened by her attempts to abrogate the Bayonet Constitution, pro-American elements in Hawaiʻi overthrew the monarchy on January 17, 1893. The overthrow was bolstered by the landing of US Marines to protect American interests, which rendered the monarchy unable to protect itself. The coup d'état established the Republic of Hawaiʻi, but the ultimate goal was the annexation of the islands to the United States, which was temporarily blocked by President Grover Cleveland. After an unsuccessful uprising to restore the monarchy, the oligarchical government placed the former queen under house arrest at the `lolani Palace. On January 24, 1895, Liliʻuokalani was forced to abdicate the Hawaiian throne, officially ending the deposed monarchy. Attempts were made to restore the monarchy and oppose annexation, but with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed Hawaiʻi. Living out the remainder of her later life as a private citizen, Liliʻuokalani died at her residence in Honolulu on November 11, 1917.

Fred Korematsu
January 30, 1919 - March 30, 2005

Fred Korematsu was a U.S. citizen and the son of Japanese immigrants, had refused to evacuate when President Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Korematsu, age 23, was arrested, convicted, and sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah. Persuaded by Ernest Besig, then executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, Korematsu filed a case on June 12, 1942. The premise of the lawsuit was that Korematsu’s constitutional rights had been violated and he had suffered racial discrimination. However, the court ruled against Korematsu and he was sentenced to five years probation. Determined to pursue his cause, Korematsu filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, later, to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled against him, and confirmed that the denial of civil liberties based on race and national origin was legal. After the war he moved to Detroit where his younger brother lived. There he met his soon-to-be wife Kathryn. They were married in Detroit and moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1949, where they raised their two children, Karen and Ken.

In 1983, Prof. Peter Irons, a legal historian, together with researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, discovered key documents that government intelligence agencies had hidden from the Supreme Court in 1944. The documents consistently showed that Japanese Americans had committed no acts of treason to justify mass incarceration. With this new evidence, a pro-bono legal team that included the Asian Law Caucus re-opened Korematsu’s 40-year-old case on the basis of government misconduct. On November 10, 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned in a federal court in San Francisco. It was a pivotal moment in civil rights history. He remained an activist throughout his life. In 1998, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Clinton. Korematsu’s growing legacy continues to inspire people of all backgrounds and demonstrates the importance of speaking up to fight injustice. On Jan. 30, 2011, the state of California celebrated Fred Korematsu Day, the first day named after an Asian American in the U.S., now recognized by six states.

Chien-Shiung Wu
May 31, 1912 - February 16, 1997

Chien-Shiung Wu’s expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie, and her many honorary nicknames include "the First Lady of Physics", "the Chinese Madame Curie", and the "Queen of Nuclear Research”.

Although Chien-Shiung was born on May 31, 1912 and raised in a small fishing town just north of Shanghai, China, she later became a U.S. Citizen in 1954. Even though it was relatively uncommon for girls to attend school, Chien-Shiung went to Mingde Women’s Vocational Continuing School. 

In 1934, Chien-Shiung graduated at the top of her class with a degree in physics from the National Central University in Nanking, China.  With financial support from her uncle, Chien-Shiung, traveled to the US and enrolled at the University of California Berkeley in 1936. In 1940, Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu (Dr. Wu) graduated with her PhD in physics.

In 1942, she married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, and moved to the east coast where Dr. Wu taught physics at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and at Princeton University in New Jersey. She was the first woman hired as faculty in the Physics Department at Princeton. In 1944, Dr. Wu took a job at Columbia University in New York City, and joined the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project is the code name for research into atomic weapons during World War II. Specifically, she improved existing technology for the detection of radiation and the enrichment of uranium in large quantities.

After World War II, Dr. Wu continued on at Columbia University, becoming a full professor in 1958 and the Michael I. Pupin Professor of Physics in 1973.  In 1956,  at the request of physicists Tsung-Dao Lee (at Columbia University) and Chen Ning Yang (Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton) Dr. Wu created an experiment testing their theory that the conservation of parity did not apply during beta decay. Dr. Wu carried out this experiment at laboratories at the National Bureau of Standards and discovered that the conservation of parity did not happen during beta decay. This experiment contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation of parity. The experiment, known as the Wu Experiment, is named for her. Yet, in 1957, Lee and Yang were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Like the contributions of many women in science at the time, Dr. Wu’s work was not acknowledged.

Dr. Wu continued to be a leader in the field of physics, and her work even crossed over to biology and medicine. She was a huge advocate for promoting girls in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and lectured widely to support this cause becoming a role model for young women scientists everywhere. Some of her other research included looking at the molecular changes in red blood cells that cause sickle-cell disease. Although denied recognition with the Nobel Prize, Dr. Wu received many accolades and honors during her career. These include being only the seventh woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1958); the first woman to receive a Sc.D. from Princeton University (1958); the Comstock Prize in Physics given by the National Academy of Sciences; Scientist of the Year by Industrial Research Magazine (1974); the first woman to be president of the American Physical Society (1975); the first person to receive the Wolf Prize in Physics (1978); and the first honorary doctorate awarded by Princeton University to a woman. Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a standard reference for nuclear physicists. In 1990, she had an asteroid named after her (2752 Wu Chien-Shiung). In 1998, Wu was inducted into the American National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Dr Chien-Shiung Wu retired from Columbia in 1981 and died of a stroke in New York City on February 16, 1997. Her ashes were buried in the courtyard of the Mingde School in China that she had attended as a girl.

Larry Dulay Itliong
October 25, 1913 - February 8, 1977

Larry Dulay Itliong was a Filipino-American labor organizer. He organized agricultural workers on the west coast starting in the 1930s, and rose to national prominence in 1965, when he, Philip Vera Cruz, Benjamin Gines, and Pete Velasco, walked off the farms of area table-grape growers, demanding wages equal to the federal minimum wage. This became known as the Delano Grape Strike. He has been described as "one of the fathers of the West Coast labor movement." He is also regarded as a key figure of the Asian American activism movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Born in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, a province in the Philippines in 1913, he immigrated to the United States in 1929 and worked as a laborer and farmhand in several states including Washington, Alaska, Montana, South Dakota, and California. During his time in Alaska, he earned the nickname “Seven Fingers” after losing three of his fingers in an accident at the cannery where he worked. Seeing the plight of his fellow Filipinos and immigrants who were mistreated and paid poorly, he joined strikes and helped set up labor unions including one in Alaska.

On September 8, 1965, as a member of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, he called a strike against the Delano, California grape growers in order to demand salaries equivalent to the federal minimum wage and the right to form their own union. Led by Itliong, more than one thousand Filipino workers walked out of their grape farms to picket, however, farmers replaced them with Mexican workers. After discussions with the Mexican-dominated National Farm Workers led by Cesar Chavez, the two groups joined forces to strike. They merged together to create the United Farm Workers Union, with Cesar Chavez as director and Larry Itliong as assistant director. This strike would last five years and lead to boycotts of table grapes across the U.S. Since 2015, October 25 in California is known as Larry Itliong Day.

Kalpana Chawla 
March 17, 1962 - February 1, 2003

Kalpana Chawla was born in Karnal, India. She died on February 1, 2003, as the world waited for the return of the Space Shuttle Columbia flight STS-107, it disintegrated over Texas during its re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. The disaster killed a seven-member crew including Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman to go into space.

Kalpana was about three or four years old when she first saw a plane and became interested in flying, according to her father. When Kalpana was in school, she spent her free time making paper planes and flying them. That eventually led her to becoming an astronaut.

After completing her high school education, Kalpana attended Punjab Engineering College where she studied aeronautical engineering in 1982.  Kalpana received a Master of science degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas, 1984 and Doctorate of philosophy in aerospace engineering from University of Colorado,1988.

Kalpana began working at the NASA Ames Research Center in 1988 and joined the Corps in March 1995 after becoming a naturalized US citizen. Kalpana was not selected as an astronaut when she applied to NASA the first time. On her second attempt, she was successful and among the twenty-three people selected for training as an astronaut. In 1997, she became the first Indian woman and second Indian to fly to space in her flight on the Space Shuttle Columbia. In 2000, Kalpana was selected for her second flight as a part of the crew of STS-107 but it turned out to be her last.

Kalpana was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, NASA Space Flight Medal and NASA Distinguished Service Medal. In order to honor her, NASA named one of its spacecraft after Kalpana Chawla. The resupply spacecraft reached the International Space station (ISS) carrying nearly 8,000 pounds of scientific investigations.

In 1998, the astronaut started the tradition of sending two kids from India to NASA every year. She was a part of the selection and the interview process. She helped to send fourteen Indian children to NASA. A role model for many young women in India and around the world, Kalpana will always be remembered for her incredible journey from Karnal, where she was born, to NASA, where she fulfilled her dream of reaching the stars.

Jerry Yang
born November 6, 1968

Jerry Yang was born Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang in Taipei, Taiwan. At the age of ten, he moved to San Jose, California, with his family. He later attended Stanford University and simultaneously earned a bachelor’s as well as master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1990. While studying for his doctorate at Stanford University, he met David Filo. The two of them went to Japan in 1992 for a six-month exchange program. After dropping out of a Ph.D. program in electrical engineering at Stanford University, Jerry Yang co-founded the web portal Yahoo in 1995.

At the time, the Internet had just been introduced, and both the men soon became hooked to the new technology and often spent hours surfing on the net. However, they found the service to be lacking. In 1995, he and David Filo started an internet website as an indexing directory of other websites called ‘Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.’ Later renamed Yahoo, an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” and Incorporated.

Yahoo had a presence before Facebook and Google and existed before we used texts or tweets.  In 1996, the company went public; its stock was offered for sale to the public for the first time and the duo became instant millionaires. He served as the company’s ‘Chief Yahoo’ from March 1995 to January 2012 and its CEO from 2007 to 2009. From 2000 to 2012, he also served as an ‘Independent Director’ of ‘Cisco Systems’.

After resigning from the board of directors at Yahoo in 2012, he founded ‘AME Cloud Ventures’, an investing company. Since its creation, the firm has provided funding to more than 50 startups including ‘Tango’, ‘Evernote’, ‘Wattpad’, and Vectra Networks. Since November 2013, he has been an Independent Director of ‘Workday, Inc’ and serves as an Independent Director of ‘Alibaba Group Holding Limited’. Since November 2014, he has been an Independent Non-Executive Director of Lenovo Group Limited and serves on the board of trustees of Stanford University. He has also served as Director of various other corporations such as ‘InfoGear Technology Corporation’, ‘American Internet Corporation’, ‘PipeLinks Inc.’, ‘ZDNet Inc.’, ‘Growth Networks Inc.’ and ‘Combinet Inc.’

Yahoo was sold to Verizon Communications in 2016. The web portal has expanded its services to include a search engine, e-mail and news. Mail, alone, now has more 200 million users.

Patsy Mink
December 6, 1927 - September 28, 2002

Patsy Mink was born Patsy Matsu Takemoto in Paia, Hawaii. After graduating as class valedictorian at Maui High School, she attended Wilson College in Pennsylvania and University of Nebraska. There, she was placed in the “International House” dormitory, which was the designated housing for students of color, as they were restricted from living in the regular dorms with white students at the time. She participated in protests and with the support of students, parents, and university trustees, the segregated housing policy later ended.

Patsy eventually transferred to the University of Hawaii, where she joined the varsity debate team and was elected president of the Pre-Medicine Students Club. After applying to and being rejected by over ten medical schools (as medical schools then were all male), she was accepted to University of Chicago Law School. During her time in Chicago, she met and married fellow graduate student, John Francis Mink. After their graduation in 1951, Patsy had difficulty finding work as an Asian American married woman so they returned to her home state of Hawaii. Despite becoming the first Japanese American woman admitted to practice law in Hawaii, she was still unable to find employment, so with the help of her father, she opened her own practice in 1953.

After serving in both the House of Representatives and Senate for the state of Hawaii, she ran for federal office and became the first woman of color and Asian American Woman elected to US Congress. During her 12 terms (24 years) in the US House of Representatives, she helped pass legislation that supported education and equality for women. Namely, she was the first to introduce comprehensive initiatives of the Early Childhood Education Act, which now offers federal programs and appropriates funding for education prior to kindergarten. Additionally, she co-authored early drafts of Title IX of the Higher Education Amendments of 1972, a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex by any institution or educational program that receives federal funding. It was later named the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act after her death in 2002.

Bishop Ignatius Wang
February 27, 1943

Ignatius Chung Wang (pronounced Wong) was born in Beijing, China in 1934, the fifth of eight children in a family that had been Christian for twelve generations. He attended Catholic schools and began his studies to become a priest at the Regional Seminary in Hong Kong. He was ordained a priest in 1959 in Hong Kong at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi. After his ordination, Fr. Wang was unable to serve in China because of the Communist government. He was sent to Rome where he completed a doctorate in Canon Law in 1962. Unable to return to China, he took an assignment on the Caribbean Island of Grenada, where he served as a parish priest and Vicar General of the Diocese of St. George.

In 1974, Fr. Wang moved to San Francisco to be near his widowed sister, who had small children and was in poor health. When his sister died of cancer, Bishop Wang became guardian of her children.  Bishop Wang began his service in the Archdiocese of San Francisco 1974. He was a Parochial Vicar in several parishes and in 1981 was named the first archdiocesan Director of the Office of Chinese Catholic Ministry. He initiated a ritual Blessing of Ancestors at the annual archdiocesan Chinese New Year’s Mass. In 1982, he was appointed pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Church in San Francisco, making Fr. Wang the first Chinese Catholic pastor in San Francisco.

Pope John Paul II named him a Prelate of Honor of His Holiness with the title of Monsignor in 1989. He also has served in the archdiocesan Tribunal and as Coordinator of the Chinese Apostolate. On Dec. 13, 2002, Pope John Paul II appointed Monsignor Wang to the post of Auxiliary Bishop in the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Bishop Wang is the first Catholic Bishop of Chinese ancestry and of Asian background to be appointed in the United States. He served as auxiliary bishop of San Francisco under Archbishop William J. Levada and Archbishop George Niederauer before retiring in 2009.



 

"Just Mercy" Movie Night

"Hidden Figures" Movie Night

4 week discussion group of "Open Wide Our Hearts"
(the U.S. Bishop's pastoral letter on racism)

Online Prayer Service for MLK Day - click HERE to view

Black History Month: 'Did You Know' feature about famous African Americans, music for 'Music Mondays' on social media

Presentation by the Georgetown Memorial Project

Prayer Vigil for Racial Reconciliation on the Anniversary of the
Murder of George Floyd

USCCB's Committee Against Racism - click HERE

ADW's Anti-Racism Initiative - click HERE