HONOLULU — The Hawaii Filipino Lawyers Association is seeking to overturn the 1924 conspiracy conviction of Pablo Manlapit, a pioneering labor organizer and Hawaii’s first Filipino lawyer, and restore his legacy as a key figure in the territory’s labor movement. Although Manlapit was later pardoned, the group aims to establish his legal innocence in connection with the Hanapepe Massacre on Kauai, where 16 striking Filipino sugar workers and four police officers were killed.

Manlapit migrated to Honolulu in 1910 to work on sugar plantations and quickly emerged as a labor leader, organizing a Filipino union that demanded equal pay and an eight-hour workday. He persuaded better-paid Japanese workers to join the cause, uniting laborers across ethnic lines. Historical accounts indicate Manlapit was not present on Kauai during the 1924 massacre, yet he was convicted, imprisoned, exiled to California, and eventually deported.

“I was railroaded to prison because I tried to secure justice and a square deal for my oppressed countrymen who are lured to the plantations to work for a dollar a day,” Manlapit wrote in a 1927 “farewell statement,” according to a biography. He died in 1969 in relative obscurity.

The Hawaii Filipino Lawyers Association is now reviewing whether legal avenues exist to clear his name posthumously. The group is also exploring the creation of a fellowship at the University of Hawaii’s law school to support formal research into the case. “It’s a story that needs to be told. A lot of us are second generation, so we don’t have knowledge of these stories,” said Daniel Padilla, the association’s president.

“His story gets overshadowed in the broader labor movement in California,” Padilla added.

Kevin Nadal, president of the Filipino American National Historical Society, emphasized the historical erasure of Filipino contributions. “Filipino Americans have historically been left out by historians,” he said. He noted that early labor organizing in Hawaii laid groundwork often misattributed solely to mainland movements. “It may have been documented through just like oral histories,” Nadal said. “We love oral histories but, if no one writes them down and then it doesn’t become published, then it just gets lost.”

“It started with Hawaii,” Nadal said. “What was happening in Hawaii, it would have been really hard for people to know that it was happening in California.”

“It would mean more of understanding justice and ensuring that people realize that we can fight for justice and that justice can prevail,” said Kevin Nadal.

Kainani Collins Alvarez, a former public defender now in private practice, is contributing her criminal defense expertise to the effort. “For me, it's really important to go back and rectify the truth,” she said. “History is built on the facts that we knew at the time.”