The Daily TexanAUSTIN, Texas – This week is a solemn day for many across the United States, as it is the 25th anniversary of the hate-crime murder of Vincent Chin. His murder signifies the beginning of the contemporary Asian Pacific American, or APA, civil rights movement.
In 1982, 27-year-old Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American draftsman and engineer, got into a confrontation with two white men, Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz, at a strip club in Detroit, Mich. where Chin was having his bachelor party. During the early 1980s, the U.S. auto industry in Detroit faced tough competition from Japanese automakers, and many workers were laid off as a result. Mistaking him to be Japanese, Ebens yelled at Chin, “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work,” according to a 2002 article from http://www.tolerance.org.
The verbal confrontation escalated into a physical scuffle between Ebens, Nitz and Chin, taking the fight from throwing punches to grabbing chairs and culminating in the three being kicked out of the club. In the parking lot, Nitz took a Louisville Slugger baseball bat out of his car, and Chin told the two men, “I’ll fight you guys more if you want, but put the baseball bat down.” When Nitz refused, Chin and his friends left.
Ebens and Nitz drove around the neighborhood for 30 minutes and finally found Chin at a local McDonalds. Nitz restrained Chin while Ebens swung the baseball bat, crushing in Chin’s skull. An off-duty police officer who witnessed the murder said Ebens “swung the bat as if a baseball player was swinging for a homerun. Full contact. Full swing.”
Chin slipped into a coma and died on June 23, 1982 – 5 days before his wedding.
About a year later, Judge Charles Kaufman of Wayne County found Ebens and Nitz guilty of manslaughter. He fined them $3,000 and sentenced them to three years of probation. Neither the prosecution nor Chin’s mother were present, and no witnesses were called in to testify.
The outrage that ensued from the lax verdict and the handling of the case sparked Asians and Asian-Americans across the U.S. to raise awareness of the issue, garnering attention from civil rights groups, such as the NAACP, and national news and talk show programs. This effort eventually led the FBI to conduct an investigation, and the U.S. Department of Justice eventually filed charges against Ebens and Nitz.
Ebens was sentenced to a 25-years in prison, while Nitz was cleared of all wrongdoing. But eventually, Ebens was cleared of all charges through an appeal and another trial. Neither Ebens nor Nitz served any prison time. A civil court ordered Ebens to pay Chin’s family $1.5 million, but Ebens refused and is still on the run from the law.
Chin’s case is not confined. Last April in Alabama, an 18-year-old Korean student was assaulted by four white males near his dorm on the Auburn University campus. Police suspected the crime to be motivated by racial bias and backlash, since it occurred three days after the Virginia Tech tragedy, and informed the FBI, which is conducting an investigation.
The media and mainstream press tend to overlook hate crimes targeting Asians and Asian-Americans. Crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans are not always reported properly by police as hate crimes, which causes these crimes to be underreported. Legislative and law-enforcement officials need to become aware that these crimes are not isolated incidents, but part of a larger trend and climate in the U.S. related to anti-Asian sentiment and racial bias.
The FBI’s most recent Uniform Crime Report, released in 2005, lists 8,804 victims of hate crimes, and 55.7 percent of those were related to racial bias. Of this percentage, 4.9 percent of the victims were listed as Asian/Pacific Islander, and this number doesn’t include cases that didn’t get reported as a hate crime.
Article courtesy of the Daily Texan at the University of Texas.