Who they were
Leader of the Korean independence movement in exile, known by his pen name Baekbeom. As a young man in 1896 he killed a Japanese national he believed was connected to Queen Min’s assassination and was imprisoned — the Chihapo incident.
What they did
From 1919 he served the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai, leading it through its darkest years. He organized the Korean Patriotic Corps, whose members carried out the 1932 attacks, including Yun Bong-gil’s Shanghai bombing that killed senior Japanese officials — acts Korea honors as resistance and Japan recorded as terrorism. After liberation he opposed the 1948 separate elections in the South and traveled to Pyongyang for unification talks that year. He was assassinated in Seoul in June 1949 by a South Korean army officer; the background of the killing remains debated.
Legacy
His memoir, the Baekbeom Ilji, is a classic. In South Korea he is revered as the uncompromising conscience of independence and unification.