Chinatown has been the social, cultural, and economic hub of New York's Asian immigrant community since the nineteenth century. When immigration quotas based on national origins were lifted in 1965, the population of Chinatown exploded. By the 1970s, Chinatown's living and working conditions had reached a high point of overcrowding and exploitation. Racism against Asians was still prevalent as well. Many non-Asian New Yorkers dismissed Chinatown as a closed, mysterious, and insular society.

During that same period, an Asian American movement was emerging from the antiwar and civil rights movements of the era. Young, liberal Asian American students and professionals across the country were reconnecting with their roots, returning to Asian immigrant communities like Chinatown and giving them a new voice. AAFE's founders came from both the Chinatown community and the Asian American movement.

In 1974, construction began on the Confucius Plaza high-rise development, a federally-funded project in the heart of New York Chinatown. Although City policies required guaranteed employment opportunities for minority workers, the builder refused to hire Chinese applicants. Outraged by this blatant discrimination, a coalition of Chinatown residents, students, and professionals came together to demand the right of access for Asian Americans to some of those construction jobs.

As more and more people joined the protests, a movement was born. The protest leaders formed a volunteer organization that they called Asian Americans for Equal Employment (AAFEE, later to become AAFE) to coordinate demonstrations, marches, and picketing around the Confucius Plaza site.

Margaret Chin, who served as AAFE's Board President from 1982 until 1986 and is now its Deputy Executive Director, participated in these protests as a college student. "It was new to attend a demonstration with young and old people together, and with so many people from the community, garment workers and so on, taking part. The group of people was really diverse, including both native-and foreign-born people, and Asian Americans of many different backgrounds, not just Chinese."

The sustained effort at Confucius Plaza spilled over, beyond the Chinatown and Asian American communities. African American and Latino construction workers also came to the site to show their solidarity with the protesters. After six months of unrelenting demonstrations, the Confucius Plaza struggle ended with AAFE's first victory for minority rights and equal employment opportunity. The builder was pressured into changing its policies and hiring twenty-seven minority workers, including Asian Americans. The people who had taken part in this movement realized that their actions made a difference.

Energized by the Confucius Plaza victory, AAFE went on to mount protests against illegal sweatshop raids and the harassment of garment workers and undocumented immigrants. With each action, the organization gained stature as an advocate for the rights of minorities.

The organization moved into a Chinatown office, where the volunteers began helping community people with their work, housing, and immigration issues as needed. Local residents, who had heard of AAFE through its demonstrations, leaflets, and information tables, or simply by word of mouth, came in to report unfair treatment and ask for the organization's support. AAFE made it clear that fighting for the rights and empowerment of the immigrant community was its first priority.

Then, in April 1975, Peter Yew, a 27-year-old architectural engineer, was dragged into the Fifth Precinct police station after a minor traffic altercation. He was stripped and beaten by police officers, and charged with assault. The community rose up in outrage. On May 19th, twenty thousand people demonstrated at the steps of City Hall to show that Asian Americans would not stand for racial injustice. For a day, Chinatown stood still as garment factories, restaurants, and shops closed down while their employees joined the protest. This action, which AAFE helped mount along with a broad coalition of family associations, social service agencies, and small businesses, proved to be a second major success: the police dropped assault charges against Mr. Yew.

Bill Chong, AAFE's Board President from 1987 - 1994, remembers the impact of these protests. "The prevailing view of Asians had been that we didn't believe in civil rights, that we were too timid to protest, that we were a 'model minority' that only wanted to integrate. AAFE created a whole new image of Asians. When people saw Asian protesters sitting in front of bulldozers at Confucius Plaza, or bringing twenty thousand people to City Hall to protest police brutality, it changed their minds."

AAFE also devoted its energies to working in partnership wi.th other minority organizations and workers' groups around issues of social justice and equal opportunity for all minorities. The organization changed its name to Asian Americans for Equality to reflect the broadening range of its concerns.

Christopher Kui started working with AAFE around 1976, teaching English classes for workers. He was soon attracted to the protests that AAFE was leading about community problems and national and international issues: the fight to exonerate Chol Soo Lee, the killing of Vincent Chin, the mistreatment of boat people from Southeast Asia, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Looking back on that period, Kui says, "Although it was new to see Asian Americans, especially immigrants, fighting for social justice in this way, it felt like the right thing to do. Someone needed to speak up for the poor, the immigrants, the mistreated workers... Through AAFE, many people in the Chinatown community felt like their voices would be heard, so they discovered the courage to get involved."

In 1979, Doris Koo (who served as the organization's first Executive Director from 1984 until 1992, and is currently a Board member) began volunteering in AAFE's housing clinics. This work revealed that living conditions in Chinatown had reached a crisis point. Many people were crowded into basements and other non-residential spaces that were illegally subdivided into tiny rooms. The high demand for living space allowed landlords to ignore housing codes and occupancy standards, and to demand elevated rents and 'key money' (cash payments to secure the option to rent).

Koo and her fellow volunteers realized that there was no place to refer people for help with their housing problems. At the city agencies and community organizations that dealt with affordable housing, nobody spoke Chinese. AAFE therefore became a link between the existing housing services and the Chinatown community.

Soon, many more people were coming to AAFE for help. Tenants complained that their heat and hot water had been shut off. Others were harassed and intimidated by their landlords. Garment factory owners were also being evicted to make room for expensive new offices. Real estate prices in New York had skyrocketed, and downtown neighborhoods like Soho and the Village were becoming fashionable. Landlords were trying to evict their low-income and small business tenants in order to cash in on the new trends.

In response, AAFE launched a campaign called "Fight Gentrification and Save Chinatown!" Their fighting words were: "Housing is a right!" They organized tenant associations and trained tenant leaders. Then, in 1981, a new ordinance creating a "Special Manhattan Bridge District" (SMBD) was passed, encouraging real estate speculators to build high-rise luxury condominiums in place of the neighborhood's existing tenements. Fearing that many more low-income residents would be displaced, AAFE filed a class-action suit against the city in 1983, known as AAFE v. KOCH.

The case was decided in AAFE's favor in the New York State Supreme Court, which marked an unexpected victory in the fight for affordable housing, although the decision was later reversed in the Court of Appeals. The lawsuit served as a significant obstacle to developers, keeping the worst effects of the ordinance at bay.

For the first ten years of its existence, AAFE had operated as an all-volunteer organization that accepted no public or private funds. As the decade drew to a close, the volunteers realized that they needed to professionalize in order to become more effective. In 1984, AAFE thus transformed itself, becoming a nonprofit organization with a full-time staff.