27-year-old Vincent Chin was beaten with a baseball bat by Ronald Ebens

27-year-old Vincent Chin was beaten with a baseball bat by Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz, after a fight at a bar in Detroit on June 19, 1982, and died four days later. Ebens, a Chrysler plant supervisor, and Nitz, shouted “It’s because of you little m—— that we’re out of work!” at Chin. Chin, who had been celebrating his bachelor party at the bar, was buried on what would have been his wedding day. Ebens and Nitz did not deny what they had done but claimed that it had all been a barroom brawl. Originally charged with second degree murder, they pleaded to manslaughter and received three years’ probation and were fined $3,000.

Ebens and Nitz killed Chin because they blamed him, an assimilated Chinese-American whose parents were immigrants, for the success of the Japanese auto industry and equated him with Japanese automakers.

Below is the trailer for Who Killed Vincent Chin?, a 1989 documentary by Christine Choy.

As Frank H. Wu, chancellor and dean of the Hastings College of the Law, University of California, writes in a New York Times op-ed,

The killing catalyzed political activity among Asian-Americans — whose numbers had steadily increased since the 1965 overhaul of immigration laws but who then represented only about 1.5 percent of the population — as never before. “Remember Vincent Chin” turned into a rallying cry; for the first time, Asian-Americans of every background angrily protested in cities across the country.

Chin’s brutal death and his killers being allowed to escape justice galvanized Asian-Americans in ways that decades of discrimination — Wu recounts the 1992 Chinese Exclusion Act, the unconstitutional internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II and the “legacy of America’s wars in the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam” — had never before. In 1983, federal prosecutors brought civil rights charges against Ebens and Nitz. Ebens was convicted of violating Chin’s civil rights and sentenced to 25 years in prison, though the sentence was overturned on appeal.

Asian-Americans are a highly diverse population, “more a demographic category than a community arising from shared language, religion, history or culture,” as Wu writes. Chin’s brutal death brought into focus that, despite the differences, Asians are perceived as being the same, as perpetual foreigners and “others”: “The fifth-generation Japanese-American from California, the Hmong refugee in Wisconsin, the Indian engineer in Texas, the Korean adoptee in Chicago and the Pakistani taxi driver in New York — all have at times been made to feel alien, sometimes immutably so.”

The Enduring Myth of the Model Minority
As a Pew Research Center study, “The Rise of Asian-Americans,” reported this past Tuesday, Asians have surpassed Hispanics as the US’s fastest-growing ethnic group in 2009. When Chin was killed in 1982, Asians represented only 1.5 percent of the population; they now make up 5.8 percent.

http://www.care2.com/causes/vincent-chin-asian-american-civil-right.html?page=2