Hers is an improbable warrior figure looming out of the darkest hours of a conquered kingdom at the dawn of the last century.

Independence fighter-evangelist-feminist Hwa Mok Kim Lee, who passed away in 1997 at age 99 in Los Angeles, was a fearless messenger of God and independence in the Land of the Morning Calm. At age 20, she held high the Bible in one hand and the Declaration of Korean Independence in the other. She didn’t hesitate to wield the former as her shield and the latter as her sword.

Eloquent and defiant, she thundered against the triad evil of Japanese colonialism, Confucian feudalism and male chauvinism within her own church. The year before the world-famous Billy Graham was born, the first Korean female evangelist preached to masses of nonbelievers, reaching out to the vast plains of Manchuria spreading the Gospel. Thousands of hungry souls flocked to hear her stirring sermons under watchful Japanese censors. And like Rosa Parks, she refused to yield to bigotry and segregation by crossing the lines, demanding equal rights for women who were at the bottom rung of Confucian serfdom. Long before American women campaigned for their rights, the pre-feminism feminist waged a marathon crusade, challenging the bedrock male chauvinism within her native church.

Few among the new waves of Korean immigrants know her name, but Lee beckons as the fighting symbol of equal rights for women within male-centered Korean churches, where few women are ordained as elders or pastors.

Like Joan of Arc, the young maiden pursued her calling that drove her tenaciously to rid her homeland of its invaders.

In her hometown of Pyongyang on the fateful March 1, 1919, the fiery agitator led marching columns of young school girls, waving forbidden Korean flags and shouting, “Mansei — long live independence,” amid rattling sabers of mounted Japanese police. She suffered three months of torture in prison. Seventy-six years later in 1992, at 94, the wizened freedom fighter haltingly spoke of undergoing the “excruciating pain … that I can’t express in words” in an emotional interview with then KTAN-TV anchor Richard Young Woo Kim. In her pronounced Pyongyang dialect, she blurted out, “[The Japanese police interrogators] tortured me many times to get the secrets of the movement out of me.” They didn’t succeed.

Lee (right) raised her children, including daughter Ai-kyung (left), on her own in Korea while her husband was in America.

After three months, she was released. “I had convinced police that I was the lone relative left to take care of my sick, frail parents.”

In those feudal times, virgins stayed home until they were married off, as did married women to serve the in-laws. Lee refused to follow either path. Just a year before her imprisonment, she married Lee Sun Tu, who attended Sung Sil College, the only Christian college in what is now North Korea, which produced a cadre of independence fighters.

Fresh out of Pyongyang Presbyterian Seminary, she became the first female elder and evangelist at the Seo-mun-bak Presbyterian Church, the oldest and biggest church in Pyongyang — a breakthrough in the old Korea.