Bonnie Youn is a distinguished immigration attorney and a human rights activist.
Bonnie Youn is a distinguished immigration attorney and a human rights activist. The White House honored her with a 2013 Cesar Chavez Champions of Change Award. She heads the Youn Law Group in Atlanta, which provides immigration services.
The March on Washington 50 years ago was about civil rights and equal opportunity and people of every race participated in the effort.
“America has strengths unlike any other country,” She said. According to Youn, in America race and class are not as rigid as they are in other, older, countries, and people have the freedom of expression.
“We have the freedom to vocalize [our wish for civil rights] in a public, peaceful setting. We have that setting in a stable democracy,” she said.
Asian-American Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have played an important role in America’s civil rights movement past and present.
“There have been AAPIs who have been very involved in the civil rights movement,” said Youn, citing the Japanese American Citizens League as an example. “It’s so powerful.”
Youn is of Korean descent. A friend of hers with close ties to Atlanta’s civil rights efforts, is of Chinese descent.
According to Youn, her friend’s father, Jack Shaw, taught judo to young black students in the 1960s and early 1970s. When his pupils were forbidden to take part in a martial arts competition, he became an accidental civil rights activist, working with Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church to end segregation.
Though AAPIs have long worked for justice and human rights, their contributions are often ignored, according Helen Kim Ho, attorney and founder of the Asian American Legal Advocacy Center, a civil rights NGO.
Ho says Asian-Americans have always been involved in civil rights. For example in the 1960s, very vocal Japanese-Americans helped end the ethnic quota system in immigration.
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