Sam Chu Lin

Journalist and activist

• Born: March 3, 1939
• Place of Birth: Greenville, Mississippi
• Died: March 5, 2006
• Place of Death: Burbank, California

A pioneering journalist, Sam Chu Lin was one of the first Asian Americans to become a reporter on radio and television. During a career that spanned five decades, he worked for multiple major broadcasting networks and regularly contributed articles to numerous Asian American publications.

Areas of achievement: Journalism, radio and television, activism

Early Life

Samuel Chu Lin was born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi. His family had settled in the Mississippi Delta in the late nineteenth century, becoming part of a Chinese American community that developed there. The Chu Lin family name was created when Chu Lin’s grandfather arrived in the United States. Immigration officials mistakenly recorded his name, Chu Lin (written in the traditional Chinese style in which the surname comes before the given name), as Chu-Lin. The family adopted the unhyphenated form as a double surname.

Growing up in segregated Mississippi, Chu Lin experienced discrimination due to his Chinese heritage. Nevertheless, he spent hours listening to radio broadcasts and ultimately decided he would become a reporter specializing in news of particular interest to Asian Americans. To that end, he contributed articles to the Greenville High School newspaper and worked to eliminate his southern accent and deepen his voice by emulating national broadcasters. He began his career in 1956 as a disc jockey and newsreader at local radio station WJPR (later WNIX), going by the name Sammy Lin. To broaden his knowledge, he enrolled as a journalism and communications major at Michigan State University.

Life’s Work

After graduating from Michigan State, Chu Lin briefly taught school before moving to Southern California, where for several years he worked as a radio reporter. In 1968, he became an on-air reporter and news anchor for KOOL-TV in Phoenix, Arizona. He met his future wife, Judy, in Phoenix; the couple would have two sons, Mark and Christopher.

By the early 1970s, Chu Lin had become a reporting correspondent for the CBS News network and was one of the first Asian Americans to appear regularly on air. In 1975, while working for CBS in New York City, he was tapped to announce the fall of Saigon, Vietnam, to a national audience. As a reporter and correspondent, Chu Lin interviewed presidents and world leaders. In the late 1970s, Chu Lin returned to the West Coast to work for KTLA-TV in Los Angeles. He became a frequent contributor to KQED public radio in San Francisco, regularly reporting on Pacific Time, a weekly newsmagazine program.

Chu Lin also worked as an occasional actor during the 1970s, appearing as a doctor in an episode of the television series Adam-12 and several episodes of the series Marcus Welby, M.D., and as a newscaster in the 1976 movie The Witch Who Came from the Sea.

In 1981, he joined NBC-affiliated KRON-TV in San Francisco, where he worked as a reporter until 1984. After leaving KRON, Chu Lin found work as a reporter at area stations and contributed articles to such Asian American publications as East-West, Rafu Shimpo, and Nichi Bei. He wrote a regular column for Asian Week. In 1989, Chu Lin traveled abroad and reported on the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, China. Between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, Chu Lin worked for the technology company Hewlett-Packard, for which he helped establish a television news department and produced and hosted HP Magazine, a company video program. For the last decade of his life, Chu Lin was a freelance journalist for Fox-affiliated KTTV in Los Angeles. He died on March 5, 2006, following a brief illness.

Chu Lin was accorded numerous honors during his lifetime, including the Golden Mike and Associated Press awards for news coverage. His documentary piece “Chu Lin Is an Old American Name,” which explores his family’s immigrant roots and experiences as Chinese Americans, won a National Headliner Award for best television documentary. In 2005, he received the Spirit of America Award from the National Chinese American Citizens Alliance and an award recognizing his service to the Asian American community from the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Significance

A journalist respected for his curiosity, tenacity, and integrity, Sam Chu Lin dedicated the majority of his professional career to the advancement of Asian American causes. As one of the first journalists of Asian descent to appear on major news programs, he contributed greatly to the visibility of Asian Americans in journalism. In recognition of his accomplishments, Chu Lin was posthumously honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Asian American Journalists Association in 2007.

Bibliography

Chow, Christopher. “Casting Our Voices.” Chinese American Forum15.4 (2000): 28–30. Print.

Chung, L. A. “Chu Lin Paved Path for Journalists.” San Jose Mercury News 8 Mar. 2006. Web. 17 Feb. 2012.

Jung, John. Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers. Yin and Yang, 2008. Print.

Nelson, Valerie J. “Sam Chu Lin, 67: Asian American Broadcast Pioneer Joined CBS News in 1970s, Worked for KTTV in LA.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 9 Mar. 2006. Web. 17 Feb. 2012.

"Sam Chu Lin." IMDb, 2024, www.imdb.com/name/nm1348105. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.