The incursion of armed federal immigration brokers in his beloved hometown of Los Angeles shocked Kent Wong.
The labor chief and educator spent the summer time vigorously organizing coaching classes for greater than a thousand employees and union organizers to peacefully protest the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrant communities. It was work he had performed for a lot of his life, however which he mentioned had taken on extra urgency now.
“This can be a time that requires considerate, mass motion,” Wong instructed The Occasions in an interview in July. “How may this blatant racial profiling, the terrorizing of the communities of Los Angeles, happen with out a direct problem to this injustice? That’s why we got here collectively.”
Wong, who spent many years educating a doctrine of nonviolent resistance, died Wednesday at a hospital in Los Angeles on the age of 69, attributable to cardiopulmonary failure with issues from endocarditis.
His household and his longtime colleagues mentioned the ideas of understanding and peace he advocated have been reflective of how he additionally carried out himself in his private life. He was additionally identified for holding intently the reason for supporting immigrant employees, in addition to fostering Asian American labor leaders.
“On the coronary heart of every little thing Kent did was his unwavering dedication to defending and uplifting immigrant employees,” mentioned California state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, a former longtime labor chief who constructed deep ties with Wong over many years of working collectively, in an announcement.
Susan Minato, co-president of hospitality union Unite Right here Native 11 who was concerned in organizing the coaching classes over the summer time with Wong, mentioned when he based an affinity group known as the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance within the Nineties, he reached out and introduced her into the fold.
“Embracing individuals and making individuals really feel comfy and like they belonged is nonviolence in an interpersonal approach, and he practiced that,” Minato mentioned.
As a fifth-generation Chinese language American, Wong had all the time understood the battle of immigrants, and sought to attach the labor motion throughout borders.
He was the son of Los Angeles County Superior Court docket Choose Delbert Wong, the primary Chinese language American choose in the USA, and Dolores Wong, a psychiatric social employee and chief within the effort to ascertain a public library in Chinatown.
Each of Wong’s grandmothers, who have been born within the U.S., misplaced their citizenship once they married male Chinese language nationals — the impression of the Chinese language Exclusion Act, which went into impact in 1882.
“He noticed how citizenship is usually a weapon used to divide communities and divide households,” his son Ryan mentioned.
Wong helped to set up sister-city relations between the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and labor councils in Shanghai and Beijing in China in 2007. Amongst his unfinished initiatives was to deliver U.S. and Palestinian labor educators to fulfill in Jordan, to develop cross-border ties and curriculum.
Wong’s son known as him a “light, loving man,” recalling how Wong would pack lunch for him and his brother each day whereas they have been rising up, and cooked dinner practically each night time.
“He had this superb skill to return residence, look within the fridge and cook dinner a bok choy dish, a pork dish, and rice and tofu dishes in underneath an hour,” he mentioned.
And he would speak his sons by means of conflicts patiently and rationally, “by means of all sides of what was taking place,” Ryan mentioned.
“Somewhat than simply say, it’s that individual’s fault or your fault, he was all the time bringing his organizer thoughts to how we’d restore the connection and transfer ahead collectively,” he mentioned. “I’d say he lived by his ideas of nonviolence and equality and love additionally within the residence. “
Wong had nice admiration for employee and civil rights icon the Rev. James Lawson Jr., who served as a longtime mentor to Wong, in addition to different stalwarts in L.A., together with Durazo and town’s Mayor Karen Bass.
Wong grew up in Silver Lake, and attended the L.A.-based Individuals’s Faculty of Regulation, which had been based with the purpose of coaching authorized advocates for underserved communities.
Early in his profession, Wong was the employees lawyer for a neighborhood chapter of the Service Workers Worldwide Union. He served because the founding president of the United Assn. for Labor Training, and a vice chairman of the California Federation of Academics.
He joined the UCLA Labor Middle as its director in 1991, and drastically grew its ranks, increasing it from three employees members to 42. He helped to safe further state funds to create a UC-wide community of labor analysis facilities throughout 9 campuses.
In 2021, with help from Durazo, Wong secured funding from the California Legislature to ascertain a everlasting residence for the UCLA Labor Middle within the working-class neighborhood of MacArthur Park, with the workplace constructing named in honor of Lawson, who died final yr.
Bass mentioned that town had “misplaced certainly one of its biggest champions for justice.”
“His legacy lives on within the Labor Facilities throughout the UC system, within the hundreds of organizers he mentored, and in each employee who stands a bit taller as a result of Kent Wong believed in them,” Bass mentioned in a Thursday assertion.
Wong’s loss of life adopted the sudden passing of one other person who roiled the area people, Buena Park labor chief Andrea Zinder, who was a 42-year veteran of the United Meals and Industrial Staff union in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Wong is survived by his two sons, Ryan and Robin; his spouse, Jai Lee; his sister, Shelley Wong Pitts; and a brother, Marshall Wong. One other brother of his, Duane Wong, died in 2016.
