Kent Wong, a champion of nonviolent resistance in the L.A. labor movement, dies at 69

The incursion of armed federal immigration agents in his beloved hometown of Los Angeles shocked Kent Wong.

The labor leader and educator spent the summer vigorously organizing training sessions for more than a thousand workers and union organizers to peacefully protest the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrant communities. It was work he had done for much of his life, but which he said had taken on more urgency now.

“This is a time that calls for thoughtful, mass action,” Wong told The Times in an interview in July. “How could this blatant racial profiling, the terrorizing of the communities of Los Angeles, take place without a direct challenge to this injustice? That’s why we came together.”

Wong, who spent decades teaching a doctrine of nonviolent resistance, died Wednesday at a hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 69, due to cardiopulmonary failure with complications from endocarditis.

His family and his longtime colleagues said the principles of understanding and peace he advocated were reflective of how he also conducted himself in his personal life. He was also known for holding closely the cause of supporting immigrant workers, as well as fostering Asian American labor leaders.

“At the heart of everything Kent did was his unwavering commitment to protecting and uplifting immigrant workers,” said California state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, a former longtime labor leader who built deep ties with Wong over decades of working together, in a statement.

Susan Minato, co-president of hospitality union Unite Here Local 11 who was involved in organizing the training sessions over the summer with Wong, said when he founded an affinity group called the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance in the 1990s, he reached out and brought her into the fold.

“Embracing people and making people feel comfortable and like they belonged is nonviolence in an interpersonal way, and he practiced that,” Minato said.

As a fifth-generation Chinese American, Wong had always understood the struggle of immigrants, and sought to connect the labor movement across borders.

He was the son of Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Delbert Wong, the first Chinese American judge in the continental United States, and Dolores Wong, a psychiatric social worker and leader in the effort to establish a public library in Chinatown.

Both of Wong’s grandmothers, who were born in the U.S., lost their citizenship when they married male Chinese nationals — the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which went into effect in 1882.

“He saw how citizenship is often a weapon used to divide communities and divide families,” his son Ryan said.

Wong helped to establish sister-city relations between the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and labor councils in Shanghai and Beijing in China in 2007. Among his unfinished projects was to bring U.S. and Palestinian labor educators to meet in Jordan, to develop cross-border ties and curriculum.

Wong’s son called him a “gentle, loving man,” recalling how Wong would pack lunch for him and his brother daily while they were growing up, and cooked dinner nearly every night.

“He had this amazing ability to come home, look in the refrigerator and cook a bok choy dish, a pork dish, and rice and tofu dishes in under an hour,” he said.

And he would talk his sons through conflicts patiently and rationally, “through all sides of what was happening,” Ryan said.

“Rather than just say, it’s that person’s fault or your fault, he was always bringing his organizer mind to how we would repair the relationship and move forward together,” he said. “I would say he lived by his principles of nonviolence and equality and love also in the home. “

Wong had great admiration for worker and civil rights icon the Rev. James Lawson Jr., who served as a longtime mentor to Wong, as well as other stalwarts in L.A., including Durazo and the city’s Mayor Karen Bass.

Wong grew up in Silver Lake, and attended the L.A.-based People’s College of Law, which had been founded with the goal of training legal advocates for underserved communities.

Early in his career, Wong was the staff attorney for a local chapter of the Service Employees International Union. He served as the founding president of the United Assn. for Labor Education, and a vice president of the California Federation of Teachers.

He joined the UCLA Labor Center as its director in 1991, and greatly grew its ranks, expanding it from three staff members to 42. He helped to secure additional state funds to create a UC-wide network of labor research centers across nine campuses.

In 2021, with support from Durazo, Wong secured funding from the California Legislature to establish a permanent home for the UCLA Labor Center in the working-class neighborhood of MacArthur Park, with the office building named in honor of Lawson, who died last year.

Bass said that the city had “lost one of its greatest champions for justice.”

“His legacy lives on in the Labor Centers across the UC system, in the thousands of organizers he mentored, and in every worker who stands a little taller because Kent Wong believed in them,” Bass said in a Thursday statement.

Wong’s death followed the unexpected passing of another person that roiled the local community, Buena Park labor leader Andrea Zinder, who was a 42-year veteran of the United Food and Commercial Workers union in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Wong is survived by his two sons, Ryan and Robin; his wife, Jai Lee; his sister, Shelley Wong Pitts; and a brother, Marshall Wong. Another brother of his, Duane Wong, died in 2016.