History
In 1983, President Emeritus Stewart Kwoh founded Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California (AJSOCAL), formerly known as Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles (AAAJ-LA), as the Asian Pacific American Legal Center just the year after Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man, was brutally murdered in Detroit by two white autoworkers who blamed Japan for the downturn in the American auto industry. AJSOCAL provided out-of-state counsel for the high-profile hate crime case that resulted from Mr. Chin’s murder. His death, and this case, ultimately marked a pivotal moment in Asian American civil rights history.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California continued to provide landmark legal services as the lead counsel in the 1995 groundbreaking federal civil rights lawsuit, Bureerong v. Uvawas. Representing 80 Thai garment workers who had been trafficked and imprisoned in El Monte, California, the case is widely considered a wake up call to human trafficking and modern-day slavery in the United States, leading to the reformation of garment industry labor regulations.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California (AJSOCAL) has continued its work providing Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities with multilingual, culturally sensitive legal services, education, and civil rights support. A year after it was founded, in 1984, AJSOCAL launched its citizenship assistance program. In 2002, AJSOCAL launched the Asian Language Legal Intake Project (ALLIP) with local legal aid organizations in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, creating hotlines to provide legal assistance to non-English speaking communities in Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Thai, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Spanish.
In 2010, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California (AJSOCAL) joined its sister civil rights affiliates – Asian American Institute (AAI), Asian American Justice Center (AAJC), and Asian Law Caucus (ALC) – in announcing that the four organizations are formally joining together as the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice, currently known as Asian Americans Advancing Justice. In addition to AJSOCAL, the network of affiliated Asian American Advancing Justice organizations are currently located in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, DC.
Today, the agency serves the Los Angeles and Orange Counties, as well as educational programs with national reach. Approximately 70-80% of those served are AAPI, while the remaining 20-30% are Latino, African American, and White.
With its focus on both Los Angeles and Orange Counties, the nonprofit renamed itself in July 2022 as Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California which reflects the unified organization while it continues to serve both counties and beyond.