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.

Corky Lee said his life's mission was the pursuit of what he called photographic justice,

changing America one photograph at a time.

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

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.

League said one of his most defining images showed sick Americans in Central Park in the days after the 9-11 attacks, a time when six were targets of violence and discrimination.

We read in the history books that America's a nation of immigrants. I just want to say that

Asians in this country are part and parcel of a much larger picture.

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 in a textbook.

It shows only white men. Where he wondered with 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.

That photograph will be hung next to the one that appears in every history textbook.

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