Four brown bags arrive at a crowded, book-lined conference room—ground zero for the New York City-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF). Attorney Tito Sinha pushes aside a list of rebuttal arguments he has been writing for a school-board election case to make room for three noodle soups, several rice and vegetable dishes, two soft pretzels, and a sandwich.

“Call for Ken—judge’s chambers on Line 2,” says a voice over the intercom. Meanwhile, other conversations continue—about Sinha’s case, a funding proposal, an upcoming presentation at a public school in Queens, the status of an anti-Asian American incident in Syracuse.

As Sinha gobbles down his last pieces of rice and broccoli, another call comes in. A Sikh man says he has been denied service at a restaurant because he wears a turban, as prescribed by his religion.

AALDEF will go on to win this case, as it has thousands of others in the past 25 years. Though the faces have changed, AALDEF’s mandate is the same: Righting wrongs through individual representation and group-based education.

Over a generation’s time, the group has helped Asian Americans fight discrimination, whether the issue is police brutality, hate crimes, immigrant rights or affirmative action. AALDEF’s impact has been felt in Congress, in the U.S. Supreme Court and in countless city, state and regional forums.

Last month, the group that started on a shoestring in 1974 celebrated its silver anniversary with a tony celebration that drew more than 800 people to New York’s Pier 60. Founding board members Loida Nicholas Lewis, now CEO of TLC Beatrice International, and Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, received special honors.

Gordon Hirabayashi, 81, who after decades overturned his conviction for resisting curfew and exclusion orders as a Japanese American during World War II, praised AALDEF for being “one of the few groups that is willing to speak out in the face of opposition. That is what needs to be encouraged and nurtured.”

THE WAY WE WERE
AALDEF started at a time when the legal industry was not especially welcoming to minorities and when Asian Americans—even more so then than now—tended to seek professions that highlighted scientific rather than verbal skills. Only a few hundred Asian Americans were attorneys then, compared with about 10,000 today, according to Peter Suzuki, president of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA).

The generations-long lack of Asian American lawyers meant that there were no Chinese American attorneys to file lawsuits when anti-Chinese riots broke out in Los Angeles in 1871, Denver in 1880, and Rock Springs, Wyo., in 1885. It meant that only white lawyers could be found to represent Chinese Americans protesting San Francisco ordinances that stymied their ability to run laundries in the 1880s. Sikh loggers, on the other hand, had no legal recourse after mobs chased them out of Everett and Bellingham, Wash., in the early 1900s, after which they fled to the Imperial Valley.

No Filipino American attorneys were there to demand justice when Fermin Tober was killed in the anti-Filipino riot in Watsonville, Calif., on Jan. 22, 1930. And while attorneys brought legal challenges to the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, none of the lawyers were Asian American.

Just as the fight for freedom in Europe galvanized returning African American soldiers to fight segregation and injustice when they returned home in the 1940s and ’50s, several Japanese and Chinese Americans turned to law as a profession after World War II. Future legislators Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga, future judges Raymond Uno and Bill Marutani, and others helped grow the legal ranks.

The civil rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s fostered a new consciousness among Asian Americans, as well as a renewed resolve to protest discrimination and exploitation. Waiters and garment workers started asking if they had any legal remedies instead of just grumbling if the boss stole the tips. Japanese Americans questioned more visibly the unjust internment they had suffered during World War II. Social workers pushed for wide remedies to address the housing, employment and immigration problems disproportionately affecting elderly Asian Americans.
More than ever before, Asian Americans were asserting that they were Americans who deserved to have their rights respected as much as anyone else. Law became a tool for them to use rather than a weapon that was used against them.

AALDEF’S BEGINNINGS
The lack of Asian American legal voices became more apparent as the call for them grew. On both coasts, advocates focused on persuading more Asian American students to consider law as a career—either as attorneys or, as UCLA’s Glenn Omatsu recalls, as community paralegals who could act as organizers and educators.

AALDEF was a product of those times, with its roots in a legal rights workshop held during one of the East Coast’s first pan-Asian American conferences. Many of the lawyers and advocates who attended went on to start AALDEF as a group dedicated to protecting Asian Americans’ civil rights—two years after a number of young Californians founded its West Coast counterpart, the Asian Law Caucus.

San Francisco attorney Dale Minami, who had helped to start the caucus in Oakland in 1972, remembered when he first heard of a group in New York “which was putting together a legal-aid type organization for APAs, so I arranged a meeting to talk about a common vision. ... We left New York with the understanding that we would try to coordinate our work.”

Though the groups formed a national board, they “simply did not have critical mass or the personnel with the time and energy to focus on a national organization,” as Minami remembers.

But in 1976, thanks to a grant from the New York Foundation, AALDEF moved into its first office, a storefront at 43 Canal St. in New York Chinatown. The office was so small and the donated desks so close together that staffers sometimes had to duck into the restroom to hold confidential discussions with clients. But there was something special about the office—something money couldn’t buy. Volunteers wrote legal rights pamphlets on immigration and employment rights and distributed them at street fairs and social service agencies. Waiters would walk in unannounced and speak in their native Toishan dialect of Chinese. Hearings before administrative law judges at the Department of Labor were treated as “impact cases,” even though they might have been viewed as routine elsewhere. When one of the cases made the newspapers, everyone would gather to pass the clippings around.

In 1977, law graduates Stanley Mark, Susan Chong Wong and Kenneth Chu joined the AALDEF staff as full-time attorneys, providing legal advice on family law, immigration and government benefits under the supervision of legal services lawyer Josephine Ho. In 1980, an AALDEF intern asked Sue Pai Yang, a community activist and registered dietitian from New Jersey, if she knew of anyone interested in going to law school. A few weeks later, Yang called and said that she herself was interested. Changing careers, Yang not only became a lawyer, but also a role model for two daughters who themselves have become lawyers.

In 1980, AALDEF moved to an office near the federal and state courthouses in lower Manhattan that had doors that actually closed and space for a copy machine. The neighborhood had relatively little crime, but just in case they couldn’t meet the rent and had to move again, staffers took along the iron window bars they had installed at Canal Street and left them in a corner.

They also put up posters from the first National Asian Pacific American Law Student Association conference at New York University Law School in 1981—a reminder of their roots.

THE CASE FILE
AALDEF’s first cases were indicative of those to follow over the next quarter century.

The group has written or signed on to briefs addressing affirmative action, immigration reform and most of the civil rights cases that have come before the high court in the last quarter century. Bill Lann Lee fought for affirmative action and labor rights at AALDEF in 1979-’80, long before being appointed as the Justice Department’s civil rights watchdog.

“AALDEF has left a singularly unique imprint on every major civil rights issue facing Asian Pacific Americans in New York as well as nationally for the past quarter century,” said UCLA Professor Don T. Nakanishi, director of the university’s Asian American Studies Center.

In 1974, AALDEF attorneys represented Filipina American nurses who were challenging what they saw as unfair H-1 visa procedures that had created a revolving door of long hours, exploitative conditions, a test that few had time to prepare for, and for many, an abrupt return to the Philippines. In some ways, the case was similar to one filed this year by a group of Filipina nurses in Gladstone, Mo., who alleged they were paid less than their American counterparts—but in that case, the EEOC ruled against the employer.

In the mid-1990s, the group worked with the state attorney general’s office to secure a $1.1 million settlement on behalf of 70 workers at Jing Fong, Chinatown’s largest restaurant. Some had been paid less than $1 per hour.

In 1997, AALDEF attorney Liz OuYang filed suit on behalf of Asian American students assaulted in what they said was a racist brawl outside a Denny’s restaurant in Syracuse, N.Y. Said law professor Margaret Chon, who was teaching at Syracuse University at the time: “Smaller communities like Syracuse have their own set of issues with multiculturalism, so it’s important to have centers of gravity like AALDEF.”

SHAPING THE FUTURE
Funded by foundations, corporations and individuals, but not government agencies, AALDEF today has 11 staffers, including six attorneys. It moved into its Hudson Street headquarters in downtown Manhattan in 1985. While the group says its total budget is $800,000 per year, it would not divulge attorneys’ salaries beyond assuring that they were far below New York City corporate norms.

In 1993, AALDEF joined with the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California in Los Angeles to form the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, plans are underway for a satellite office in Queens.

With decades of experience in the courts, AALDEF has also recognized that getting involved in the electoral system and changing the laws from within is sometimes more effective than battling cases once problematic laws are passed. Though its nonprofit status prohibits the group from making political endorsements, AALDEF in 1988 conducted the first-ever presidential election exit poll geared specifically toward Asian American voters in New York City. And on Tuesday, the U.S. Justice Department upheld its decision to preserve proportional representation in the city’s school board elections, under which smaller minority groups get a better chance at electing candidates. AALDEF had long fought to maintain the system. (See related article on Page 10.)

As she accepted her award at the group’s March 25 banquet, Lewis spoke of her late husband Reginald, who “through sheer daring broke through that highly selective game of high finance ... and created the largest black-owned business in the United States.”

She noted that as the nation becomes more multicultural, with 1 in 4 New Yorkers already foreign-born, “we need to be more understanding and more tolerant. We have to listen to one another better than any other generation before us.”