The history-making legacy of Asian American photographer Corky Lee

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• John Yang:

  May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander heritage Month. So tonight for our series Hidden Histories, we introduce you to Corky Lee, a photographer who chronicled the daily lives, struggles and contributions of Asian Americans, a community that's often marginalized, unsung and unseen.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  Corky Lee said his life's mission was the pursuit of what he called photographic justice, changing America one photograph at a time.

• Corky Lee:

  In all my photographs, I'm trying to include pages that should be in American history books that have been omitted.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  His photos were used by the New York Times, Time magazine and the Associated Press, among others. Lee was there when Chinese Americans took to the streets of New York in 1975 to protest the police beating of a Chinese American man.

  He was in Detroit in 1983 when protests erupted over the lack of prison time for two white men who had pleaded guilty to killing Vincent Chin. Lee said one of his most defining images showed sick Americans in Central Park in the days after the 9/11 attacks, a time when Sikhs were targets of violence and discrimination.

• Corky Lee:

  We read in the history books that America is a nation of immigrants. I just want to say that Asians in this country are part and parcel of a much larger picture.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  Telling the story of his career, Lee often said it began in junior high school when he saw this iconic photo of the completion of the transcontinental railroad and its textbook. It shows only white men. Where, he wondered, were the thousands of Chinese laborers who laid the tracks.

  On the 145th anniversary of the event in 2014, he did something about it. Gathering descendants of those workers in Utah for a recreation. Lee considered it his greatest achievement.

• Corky Lee:

  That photograph will be hung next to the one that appears in every history textbook. So this is my small contribution or way to for Chinese to Chinese Americans to reclaim part of their history.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  Lee Young Kwok was born in Queens in 1947, the eldest son of a laundry owner and a seamstress. He attended New York City public schools, where he acquired the nickname he carried for the rest of his life, Corky. He was the first member of his family to go to college, studying history at Queen's College.

  It was while working as a community organizer on Manhattan's Lower east side in the 1970s that Lee began taking pictures documenting poor housing conditions.

• Corky Lee:

  When people look at the photographs, they can sort of read into it. If they see deplorable conditions, they can say, this has to change, and maybe it'll motivate people to do something to enact those changes.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  Lee took pictures of other things, too, and began selling them to newspapers and magazines.

• Corky Lee:

  It got to a point that I started to use the photographs for documentary purposes, and it became, I guess, a means of expression, because I can't write, I can't sing, I can't dance.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  In a five-decade career as a freelance photographer, he captured the everyday, often unsung accomplishments and struggles of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in politics and demonstrating for better housing, education and voting rights.

  He was a great believer in paying it forward. Annual photo auctions raise more than $100,000 in scholarship funds for the Asian American Journalists Association. He never stopped working. While the world shut down for the pandemic, Lee documented the anti-Asian hate that spread from it. He died of complications from COVID-19 in January 2021, at age 73.

  He left behind what may be the largest collection of photos depicting the Asian American experience in the last half century.

• John Yang:

  More than 200 of Corky Lee's photos have been collected in a new book, Corky Lee's Asian America. And he's the subject of a documentary called Photographic the Corky Lee Story. It airs Monday on PBS stations.