What happened to Vincent Chin
In 1982, Chin, then 27 and a draftsman, was beaten to death by Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, two white autoworkers.
That June, Chin was celebrating his bachelor party at a strip club when he first ran into Ebens and Nitz. “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work,” Ebens said, according to a witness to the encounter.
The men got into a physical altercation and were removed from the club as a result. Ebens and Nitz, however, followed Chin to a different location, beating him with a baseball bat and ultimately cracking his skull. Four days later, Chin died from the injuries he had sustained.
The attack took place as the US was facing stiff economic competition from Japan, particularly when it came to auto manufacturing, fueling tensions between the two countries. Ebens and Nitz apparently assumed that Chin was Japanese and blamed him for the layoffs and closures US companies were experiencing.
Initially, Chin’s killing was treated as a random act of violence, according to activist and journalist Helen Zia. It wasn’t until after Ebens and Nitz took a second-degree manslaughter plea deal, and were sentenced to three years of probation and a $3,000 fine, that Chin’s death prompted a massive outcry. Neither received any jail time, despite the maximum 15-year sentence associated with the offense. They “weren’t the kind of men you send to jail,” the judge said.
“In March of 1983, when the judge sentenced the two white killers to probation, that triggered the alarm,” says Zia. “You can kill an Asian American and get off scot-free? That made everyone think, well, that could be my brother, my cousin, my father.”
After the verdict was announced, Asian Americans around the country mobilized to protest and raise awareness about the case, calling on the Justice Department to investigate the killing as a civil rights violation. This marked a huge inflection point for pan-Asian activism, as people of different ethnic groups came together to demonstrate as part of a broader Asian American movement.
“If you think about how Asian Americans were organized before his murder, we often saw ourself in our own ethnicities, but after his murder we recognized even more so that we had to come together as a community,” says Yang. These efforts built on the work of activists in the 1960s, who first embraced the term “Asian American” as they worked with Black Americans and Latino Americans to push for ethnic studies on college campuses.