Lesson Objectives

The goal of this exhibit is to have students consider the significance of documenting the Asian American experience, focusing on issues of identity, representation, and social justice to impact change.

Vocabulary:

• Documentation: the act of recording events/figures
• Advocating: publicly supporting an idea, event, or organization in a peaceful way
• Social Justice: justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society
• AANHPI: Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders
• Pioneer: a person who is among the first to explore or settle a new country or area

In the mid-1970s, New York’s rapidly growing Asian immigrant population faced mounting bigotry, discrimination, and police violence. Tensions came to a head on April 26, 1975, when 27-year-old engineering student Peter Yew intervened as officers beat a 15-year-old on Bayard Street. Police dragged Yew to the 5th Precinct, stripped and assaulted him a second time, then jailed him on spurious charges—an outrage that electrified Asian American communities nationwide.

Three weeks later, on May 19, 1975, an estimated 20,000 people filled Chinatown and Foley Square in what became the largest Asian American protest in U.S. history. Photojournalist Corky Lee moved through the sea of marchers with his camera, preserving the day’s resolve and anger frame by frame. The demonstration forced authorities to drop all charges against Yew and marked a turning point in the fight for Asian American civil rights, foregrounding New York’s Chinatown as a locus of grassroots power and cementing Lee’s legacy as the movement’s unofficial visual historian.

In 1975, Corky Lee captured the harrowing moment when Chinese-American engineer Peter Yew, his face streaked with blood, was dragged away by police after he intervened to protect a teenager involved in a minor traffic dispute. Lee’s photograph landed on the front page of the New York Post, igniting conversations across Chinatown that bridged generations and backgrounds. His camera preserved some of the few surviving images of a Chinatown alive with activism—demonstrations against the Vietnam War, police brutality, exploitative employers, and predatory landlords—affirming the neighborhood’s pivotal role in Asian-American social justice history.

In 1971, students and a teacher from Junior High School 65 gathered at Chatham Square to demand bilingual instruction—a landmark moment in Chinatown’s push for equitable education. Nearly three decades later, that vision took a major leap forward when Shuang Wen Academy (P.S. 184M) opened in 1998, becoming one of the nation’s first public Mandarin–English dual-language schools and a model for bilingual learning across the United States.

In the 1970s, New York’s Chinatown was filled with garment factories where thousands of Chinese immigrant women stitched for twelve-hour stretches on meager pay. With affordable childcare nonexistent, many had no choice but to keep their children beside them as they sewed—a reality Corky Lee documented in a 1976 photograph that shows mothers balancing piecework and parenting on the factory floor. Years of petitioning for daycare, safer conditions, and fair wages went unheard, until more than 20,000 garment workers walked off the job in a watershed strike of 1982. Their collective action compelled the International Ladies Garment Workers Union to open a Chinatown childcare center the following year and galvanized Asian American women to press more forcefully for labor, gender, and class justice within their communities.

Mrs. Lily Chow, the first Chinese woman to drive a taxi in New York. NYC, 1982.