On the still-bright summer evening of June 3, 1973, shots rang out at a bustling intersection of San Francisco’s Chinatown, teeming with locals and tourists. The crowd watched in horror as a gunman shot three bullets into a man and fled the scene. The victim was a reputed Chinatown gang advisor, Yip Yee Tak. His killing followed a string of more than a dozen unsolved murders in the ongoing war between two rival Chinese gangs. This time, the city’s mayor vowed to catch the killer. Within days, police arrested Chol Soo Lee.

This module is about how a poor and isolated Korean immigrant was racially profiled and wrongfully convicted of murder in San Francisco, California, in the 1970s. But after a journalist exposed this injustice to the public, strangers rallied to his side, building an unprecedented pan-Asian American social movement to “free Chol Soo Lee.”