In Across the Lines: A Life in Cross-Racial Solidarity, civil rights attorney Stewart Kwoh draws on a lifetime of advocacy to tell a rarely told American story. Progress has come not from isolated struggle, but from communities standing together across racial lines.

From the Filipino and Mexican American farmworkers who joined forces in the Delano grape strike of the 1960s, to Thai and Latino garment workers who challenged modern-day sweatshops in Los Angeles decades later, Kwoh traces a powerful tradition of multiracial organizing. Along the way, he introduces figures such as George Takei, a longtime family friend and actor best known for the Star Trek series, whose childhood incarceration shaped his civil rights activism; we also meet Julie Su, the first Asian American to serve as Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor, whom Kwoh first hired as a law student. Woven through these histories is Kwoh’s own journey. The son of pioneering actress and activist Beulah Quo, Kwoh came of age during the Civil Rights era. He went on to found Asian Americans Advancing Justice, which is now one of the nation’s largest Asian American civil rights organizations. With his wife, Patricia Kwoh, he later co-founded the Asian American Education Project, bringing untold histories of Asian American struggle and solidarity into classrooms across the country.

Written for readers seeking to understand how progress has been made in America, this book shows why solidarity remains essential to our future. This book is both a record of what multiracial unity has achieved and a guide for how it can be built further in this country At a time when democracy feels increasingly fragile and communities are encouraged to see their struggles as separate, Across the Lines offers a clear reminder: None of us advances alone.