Angela Oh

The Korean American Coalition, which was established in 1983 to facilitate the involvement of Korean-Americans in civic, legislative and community affairs so they would become an integral part of a broader American society, will hold its national convention in Atlanta Sept. 20-23.

The conference will attract members from all of the organization’s 15 chapters across the country. Government officials, human rights activists, scholars and businesspeople are to attend the annual event that is being hosted this year by the coalition’s Atlanta chapter.

A wide range of topics are to be addressed, including a discussion of the party platforms for the U.S. 2008 elections, entrepreneurial skills, court cases and domestic violence. The event’s keynote speaker will be U.S. Rep. Mike Honda of California, who sponsored a resolution calling on the government of Japan to deliver an apology for the treatment of Korean women during World War II.

Angela Oh, a Los Angeles-based attorney who has served on the President’s Initiative on Race during the Clinton administration and numerous other commissions and boards, is scheduled to be the noon luncheon speaker on Friday, Sept. 21.

The title of her address is “Americans of Korean Descent: Globalization and Our Future,” which she will give at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center.

“When you are talking with young people,” she told GlobalAtlanta in a telephone interview, domestic and international issues are inseparable. When I was younger the main topics on our minds were work and domestic issues, but we are not living in such times.”

According to Ms. Oh, many younger Korean-Americans today share “trans-Pacific lives as a common experience, are bilingual and navigate successfully in different cultural contexts.”

She said that in her speech she would try to address their concerns and outline the sorts of qualities they will need to succeed in the future.

“I just want to plant some seeds so that the college-age members begin to think about how their futures will be different,” she said.

“Personal qualities will be extremely important,” she added. “They will have to have the individual capacity to develop products, provide services and know how to negotiate.”

Meanwhile, she said that she hoped U.S. relations with Korea would be more balanced with the U.S. playing a less dominating role.

Her prospects for U.S. Korean relations remain positive, however. She predicted that a free trade agreement would be approved between the two countries, and that U.S. companies would continue to invest heavily in Korea as part of a strategy to enter Chinese markets.

Other speakers scheduled to address the conference are: Doug Shipman of Atlanta, who was recently appointed by Mayor Shirley Franklin to be the executive of the Center for Civil and Human Rights; Michael Horowitz, director of the Hudson Institute’s Project on Civil Justice Reform and its Project on International Religious Liberty and Grace Chung Becker, deputy assistant attorney general, Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department.