Silence gives way to defiance after hate crime
Editor’s note: How outrage over Vincent Chin’s slaying 40 years ago fired up Asian solidarity in US
On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin was savagely beaten in an attack in Detroit that led to his death days later. His killers, two white men, never spent a day in jail. This page looks back at the moment when Asian Americans finally found their voice, both in their cries for justice for Chin and an end to long-standing racism. This is the final report in a three-part series on race issues in the US.
May 9 fell on a Monday in 1983 and, typically for the time, most Chinese restaurants in the United States would close their doors that day. But, in Detroit, they had another reason to do so. The Chinese restaurateurs, chefs and waiters in the Michigan city shut down not for a well-earned break but to demand justice for the broken skull of a fellow Chinese American. The brutal murder of Vincent Chin, whose white killers never spent a day in jail, led to a nationwide outcry. What’s more, the anger from that day jumpstarted a movement asserting the rights of Asian Americans.
In Detroit’s John F. Kennedy Square, nearly 1,000 people gathered for what was believed to be the industrial city’s first protest with a predominantly Asian base. Lowwage manual laborers were joined by senior scientists and “comfortable professionals” — to use the words of Helen Zia, one of the event’s key organizers — who were with the city’s major auto manufacturers known as “the Big Three”. Grandparents who pushed baby strollers and who had never protested, bar the grievances they bottled up inside, found themselves chanting calls for change alongside the baby-boomer generation who had grown up seeing “the mistreatment of our parents and grandparents” and who were ready to “assert every right that every other American has”, said Zia, who counts herself among that questioning generation.
The placard-waving crowd covered the spectrum of Asian Americans in Detroit. Aside from Chinese, there were Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos and Vietnamese, among others. “People had overcome language and generational barriers and a lot of historic distrust to show that there’s strength in numbers,” said James Shimoura, whose grandfather came from Japan around 1913. As a young attorney, Shimoura lent legal support to Vincent’s mother, Lily Chin.
“I want justice for my son. Please help me so no other mother must do this,” the bereaved mother told her supporters on that memorable Monday.
The pain was excruciating: a year before, on June 19, 1982, Vincent celebrated his upcoming wedding at a bachelor party in a local club, before getting into a brawl with Ronald Ebens, a supervisor at a Chrysler plant, and his stepson Michael Nitz. After all of them were thrown out by the owner, Ebens and Nitz drove around the neighborhood for half an hour looking for Chin, even paying another man $20 to get in the car and help “get the Chinese”. They eventually spotted Chin in the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant.
While Chin tried to escape, he was held firm by Nitz as Ebens repeatedly bludgeoned him with a baseball bat as if he was swinging “for a home run”, according to one of the two offduty police officers who witnessed the killing. Four days later, Lily Chin removed her unconscious son from life support. The 400 guests for the 27-year-old’s forthcoming nuptials attended his funeral.
Horrific as it was, the killing was met with silence from the local Asian community, a reaction that was hardly surprising to Zia.
“The Asian population in America had been kept very small by immigration laws until 1965, so small that it could be easily targeted and taken out,” she said. “In fact, there had been burnings of Chinatown throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. And all Japanese Americans on the West Coast were arrested and thrown into camps during WWII.
“So the idea was to never make waves, and never be the nail that sticks up, because you will be hammered down.”
But the “mind-boggling injustice”, as Shimoura puts it, had ultimately led people to overcome their fears. “The criminal case was never tried since the whole system broke down from the very beginning,” he said.
Without consulting Lily Chin, the county prosecutor, who technically represented the interests of the Chin family, offered Ebens and Nitz a plea bargain, which the two accepted; their original charge of second-degree murder was reduced to manslaughter.
After pleading guilty to the reduced charge, the two were given three years’ probation and a $3,000 fine, at a brief sentencing session in a county court with the participation of only the killers’ lawyer and Judge Charles Kaufman. In the courtroom, the judge made the nowinfamous remark that “these weren’t the kind of men you send to jail … You don’t make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.”
As a family friend put it, “Vincent’s life was worth less than a used car”.
Zia placed the sentence in the context of a city in which black people made up 60 percent of the population. In Detroit, “an African American could go to jail for crossing the street in the wrong place, or having a car with an expired registration”. That meant there “was a complete recognition of what the judge meant by that remark”, she said.
Zia later found herself reaching out to black communities and political leaders whose support was “crucial for us to get a civil rights trial”.
The colossal effort also involved Ronald Hwang, then president of the Detroit chapter of the Association of Chinese Americans. Hwang’s father, a senior Ford engineer, emigrated to the US from China in the 1940s, a time followed by an era of heightened racism against Asians, due as much to the dominant anticommunist, Cold War mentality as to the Korean and Vietnam wars.
But Chin’s death, “a direct result of what was going on in Detroit” to quote Hwang, contains another recurring factor — scapegoating.
Auto industry downfall
The late 1970s and early 80s witnessed the downfall of the auto industry in the country’s “motor city”. Faced with plummeting car sales and significant layoffs, the manufacturers, politicians and union leaders joined in on a chorus of blame directed at the Japanese car industry, whose fuel-efficient models rode the wave of a new oil crisis to land on US shores, trampling the domestically produced gas-guzzlers.
What followed was fervent Japanbashing: frustrated workers attended organized events to smash Japanese cars, swinging their sledgehammers with a gusto that would have put Ebens to shame.
A few days after the sentencing, Hwang and Shimoura met with others at the Golden Star Restaurant in Ferndale, Michigan, where Chin, an industrial draftsman at an auto supplier, worked weekends as a waiter. Both Shimoura’s and Chin’s fathers joined the US Army during World War II. Through his military service, the latter, who died months before his son’s killing, earned the right to bring a Chinese bride (Lily Chin) into the US. After Lily suffered a miscarriage and was unable to have children, the couple adopted 6-yearold Vincent from China.
Also present at the group meeting was Zia, a former student activist from Princeton University who had quit medical school and traveled to Detroit to “learn what it meant to be an American in America’s heartland”. Having worked at a Chrysler stamping plant, Zia was out of a job “along with some 300,000 other autoworkers” by the end of the 1970s.
All three, who were behind an event called the Vincent Chin 40th Remembrance and Rededication, were the co-founders of the American Citizens for Justice, or ACJ, in 1983. The first explicitly pan-Asian grassroots community advocacy effort with a national scope, the group set as its goal a federal civil rights investigation into Chin’s slaying, after Judge Kaufman refused to consider resentencing.
But one crucial question remained: were Asian Americans eligible for civil rights protection? The answer from the well-respected constitutional law expert Robert A. Sedler was a definite “No”. The Civil Rights Law Act, passed in 1964 to prohibit “discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin”, applied only to African Americans, the professor told Liza Chan, his student from Wayne State University Law School who led the group’s legal effort, supported by other young Asian-American attorneys that included Shimoura and Hwang.
Fresh from university, Chan, a Hong Kong resident who was still in the country on a visa, decided to “push that proverbial envelope”, to use the words from her 2017 autobiography My Impossible Life.
One of the witnesses Chan interviewed was Racine Colwell, a dancer from the club where the brawl took place. Colwell had previously told the press that Ebens yelled to Chin: “It’s because of you mother ******* that we’re out of work”. It was something Colwell “steadfastly maintained that … she heard” when Chan talked to her both at the club and at her home.
That discovery confirmed the longheld belief among Asian Americans that Chin was a victim of racial hatred. The fact that Ebens referred directly to the Japanese auto industry before he started his hunt to “get the Chinese” drove home another point.
“Your ethnic background doesn’t protect you — you are Asian, you are yellow, you are a target,” Shimoura said.
Public campaign
As Chan investigated, Zia and others at the ACJ were engaged in a fullscale public campaign that involved lots of mechanical work in that preinternet, pre-Instagram age. For the first time in US history, an Asian American-initiated issue was considered significant national news. Rallies and protests erupted from New York to Los Angeles. The US Department of Justice received an unprecedented number of letters, telegrams and phone calls — more than 15,000 inquiries in total — demanding a federal prosecution.
As Chan wrote in her book, “a multitude of powerful political forces was harnessed and coalesced” to make Vincent Chin the first AsianAmerican victim in a civil rights trial.
Following a federal investigation and indictment by a grand jury, Ebens was found guilty of violating Chin’s civil rights in June 1984 and sentenced to 25 years in prison by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, one of the first African-American women to serve on the federal bench. Nitz was acquitted of all charges.
But if this had offered any comfort to Lily Chin, it didn’t last. Ebens’ lawyers appealed, citing an audiotape of Chan interviewing Chin’s
three friends who were with him that night. The lawyers argued that the prosecution had tampered with the witness testimony by getting them to “agree on what happened”.
A retrial was ordered and the venue was changed from Detroit to Cincinnati, where an all-white jury found no racial motivation in the killing of Chin. Ebens was acquitted and was ordered to pay $1.5 million, an amount he has so far largely dodged stumping up.
“They (Chin and his friends) were looking for trouble and they got it,” a victorious Ebens told The Detroit Free Press journalist Michael Moore, who later gained international renown as a director of documentary films including Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11.
In her autobiography, Chan, who was never called to testify on the tapes, explained her motive. “It was bad judgment on my part to hold a ‘group’ interview out of expediency and time constraints to gather relevant information as expeditiously as possible,” she wrote. “If I had intended to ‘coach the witness’, why would I have openly tape-recorded the interview?
“Mrs Chin never blamed me. I silently asked for her forgiveness,” wrote Chan, who developed lupus, an immune system disease, during the legal battle. She died in 2019, after putting up an equally courageous fight.
‘A lone warrior’
Calling Chan “a lone warrior”, Zia believes that the final outcome had much less to do with the taped interview than with the jury in Cincinnati, whose selection she had watched.
“They had 200 people they were screening to see how many of them could be impartial, whatever impartial means. And one of the questions they were asked was ‘have you ever met anyone who was Asian or Oriental?’,” recalled Zia. “If you had a friend or your child had a classmate who was Asian, they don’t want you. So they actually picked a jury that was completely ignorant about Asian Americans and the auto industry in Detroit.”
She added: “The first jury in Detroit said that it was the testimony from the dancer alone that made them find Ebens guilty. But the jury in Cincinnati couldn’t see any racism in that ‘Because of you mother ******* we are out of job’ or his “get the Chinese”, neither of which contains a racial slur,” she said.
In retrospect, Zia, considered today a key figure in the AsianAmerican rights movement, saw the outgoing, car-loving Chin as typical of her generation of Asian Americans: unlike his parents who had labored in Detroit’s Chinese laundries and restaurants, he was loud and confident, had an education and a dream, before it was shattered.
As for Shimoura, he said: “My involvement in the Vincent Chin case has validated my core values and changed the arc of my career. Today, we see China-bashing and Asian-bashing as we did Japanbashing in those days and it’s now 10 times worse.” He went on to serve as an adviser in the presidential transitional organization for Bill Clinton.
In the meantime, Asian Americans have grown from “an oddity to a significant minority”, said Hwang, who currently teaches Asian Pacific American history at the University of Michigan.
Today, Hwang still treasures the sweater that Lily Chin knitted and gave him in 2001, upon her return to the US from China, where she had stayed since 1987 to get away from the tragic memories. When she died of cancer the following year, the old campaigners — Hwang, Shimoura, Zia and Chan — attended her funeral.
“She was funny, smart, loving and full of grit. She knew every decision we made and it was always up to her whether to appear in court, or be on television, or go around the country addressing crowds. She wanted to do all of those, although it meant for her to relive the pain over and over and over,” said Zia, who was often seen by her side. “If she had not stood up, there would not have been a movement.”
One detail Zia clearly remembers is how Lily Chin would always stop and watch whenever a baby crossed her way. “She was deprived of the grandson she had hoped for, and the son whose soul she knew would never be at peace,” said Zia.
On that late evening of June 19, 1982, as Chin lay motionless on the ground, the crack of the bat on his skull echoed through the McDonald’s parking lot. His last words were: “It’s not fair.”
People had overcome language and generational barriers and a lot of historic distrust to show that there’s strength in numbers.”
James Shimoura, who lent legal support to Vincent Chin’s mother Lily Chin