His dream eventually became a reality. He never got to see it.
November 9, 1878: Ahn Chang Ho, a prominent Korean politician, Korean independence activist, and an early leader of the Korean-American immigrant community in the United States, was born in present-day North Korea.
Ahn, also known by his art name Dosan, was born into an impoverished farming family in the last decades of the Joseon dynasty. His father died when he was around 11, and his grandfather raised him.
In 1895, at 16, he was disturbed by the destruction of the First Sino-Japanese War and became determined to improve Korea. He moved to Seoul for a Western-style education at a Presbyterian missionary school, where he converted to Christianity. By about 1897, he was a leader of the Pyongyang branch of the Independence Club, giving speeches to crowds of hundreds.
On September 3, 1902, he married Helen Lee. They arrived in San Francisco on October 14, 1902, the first married Korean couple to legally immigrate to the United States, with passports numbered 51 and 52.
Building a Community
Ahn was shocked to find out how Korean Americans lived. Work was hard to find. Anti-Asian sentiment and limited English worked against them.
On September 22, 1903, Ahn and eight others founded the Korean Friendship Society, described as the first Korean American organization, and he was elected its first president. It became the Mutual Assistance Society in 1905 and helped settle and educate hundreds of Korean immigrants.
Ahn later moved to Riverside, California, where he helped establish a Korean employment bureau for citrus workers. His efforts there led to Pachappa Camp, sometimes called “Dosan’s Republic.” Riverside and a number of academics consider it the first Korean settlement in the United States.
In 1909, the society merged with the Hawaii-based United Korean Society to form the Korean National Association, widely regarded as the voice of Korean Americans until the end of World War II.
The Fight for Korea
Ahn never separated his life in America from the cause of independence. In 1907, he returned to Korea and established the Shinminhoe, a group that became a prominent independence organization.
In 1913, he founded the Young Korean Academy in San Francisco. After the March 1, 1919 uprising, he helped found the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai, and he briefly served as its president in May 1926.
In 1926, he sailed from San Pedro, California, for China and rarely returned to the United States afterward. He called for the moral and spiritual renewal of the Korean people through education as part of their struggle for independence.
Arrested by Imperial Japan
As Japan tightened its hold on Korea, Imperial Japan’s government arrested and imprisoned Ahn multiple times.
Over the course of his activism for Korean independence, Ahn Chang Ho endured severe beatings, harsh physical abuse, and torture at the hands of Japanese authorities.
His first arrest, in 1909, was tied to An Jung-geun’s assassination of Itō Hirobumi, Japan’s Resident General in Korea. In 1932, he was arrested in Shanghai in connection with Yun Bong-gil’s bombing at Hongkew Park, sent to Korea, and sentenced to five years in prison.
He was arrested again in 1937. Severe internal illness led to his release on bail, and he died on March 10, 1938, at age 59 at Keijō Imperial University Hospital. Japan’s military limited his funeral to a small number of relatives, fearing his death might lead to rebellion.
Remembered
Ahn and Helen had three sons and two daughters. Their son Philip Ahn is considered the first Korean American actor in Hollywood and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Their daughter Susan Ahn Cuddy was a U.S. Navy lieutenant and the first woman to serve as a gunnery officer in the Navy.
Ahn is buried with Helen in Dosan Park in Seoul, where a memorial hall also honors him. In Los Angeles, the freeway interchange where the 10 and 110 freeways meet was renamed the Dosan Ahn Chang Ho Memorial Interchange in 2002. The Ahn family house, which he never lived in, now sits on the University of Southern California campus.
In 2012, he was inducted into the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame in Atlanta. In 2021, South Korea’s navy put a submarine named for him into service.
Korea was liberated in 1945, seven years after his death.