Nearly 40 Years After the Vincent Chin Case, Detroit-Asia Relationship as Different as Night and Day

The#StopAsianHate movement really began with a fight in a Detroit area strip club

Vincent Jen Chin (1955–1982) was a Chinese American man killed with a baseball bat in Highland Park, Michigan, in June 1982. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

HIGHLAND PARK, Mich. ­– From bitter rivals to global partners? Detroiters still talk about that darkest night, nearly 40 years ago, that left Vincent Chin beaten to death.

Did those dark moments help put us on the road to today’s brighter relationships, transforming U.S./Asia relations and Detroit’s attitudes toward Asian Americans?

“It’s either a bar brawl or it’s a hate crime. Maybe it’s both,” Frank Wu, the president of Queens City College, who grew up in metro Detroit and has studied the case, said in an interview with NPR. “Maybe it’s ordinary people who, you know - no one these days stands up and says that’s right, I’m a racist. And that’s what’s scary about this case.”

In the 1980s, Detroit auto executives and labor leaders alike promoted a “buy American,” war-like attitude, blaming “the Japanese” and other foreign rivals for Detroit’s Big Three automakers’ declining market share.

Marketing campaigns from auto companies and unions argued it was unpatriotic to buy or own “a foreign car.” For years, the UAW banned Japanese cars from its parking lots, and union websites differentiated vehicles for purchase, segregating vehicles “made in America” from those not recommended for purchase.

Chin case helped define “hate crime”

The term “hate crimes” was partially defined by the Chin case. “You all look alike” became a rallying cry for Asian-Americans who had always identified themselves by their nations rather than race.

Rather than seeing themselves mainly as Chinese-American, Korean or Japanese-American, the case proved to be a turning point of multiple ethnic groups rallying together around the everyday challenges they faced as Asian-Americans. The Chin case made many realize some Americans see race before recognizing people as individuals or even by their nationalities.

The Vincent Chin case, debated for the past four decades, slowly helped erode and transform such attitudes throughout this area while galvanizing Asian-Americans nationwide. Every long journey begins with a few small steps, and this one started with a fight in a strip club.

The bachelor party at a strip club ultimately shook all of Detroit

On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin was 27 and eight days from his planned wedding. Three of Chin’s buddies decided he needed an old-fashioned bachelor party. They started the night drinking before deciding it was time to enjoy the entertainment at Highland Park’s Fancy Pants strip club.

Chin’s funeral occurred on the day he was supposed to get married.

Highland Park, a tough, gritty small city within Detroit’s city limits, is where the original Ford Model T was built from 1909-27. Ford left Highland Park in 1973, and Chrysler pulled out in the 1990s.

Chrysler still had its headquarters and significant operations here in 1982. Chin, then a young draftsman, and his friends were enjoying the dancers when the glares began.

Two white men, Ronald Ebens, then 42, had been a foreman at a nearby Chrysler plant. He was with stepson, Michael Nitz, then 23, who Chrysler had laid off. They wrongly assumed Chin (who was born in China and raised in Michigan) was Japanese, and he could somehow be connected to the declining sales of locally-made vehicles though both insisted there was no racism involved.

Three eyewitnesses said they heard anti-Asian racial slurs and that one of them yelled,
“It’s because of you little ... that we’re out of work!”

A fight began in the club that spilled out into the parking lot. But things intensified even after Chin and his friends fled the scene. Ebens got a 34-inch-long Jackie Robinson Louisville Slugger baseball bat out of his trunk, and he and his stepson searched for Chin until they found him at a McDonald’s parking lot a few blocks away. He used the baseball bat to strike Chin four times in the head.

$3,700 and no jail time for beating a man to death?

The case began getting even more attention locally and nationwide through Asian-American communities after a judge reduced second-degree murder charges to manslaughter. The result? The judge gave no prison time but three years’ probation for the two men plus fines and court costs of just $3,700.

The judge who made the initial ruling was himself a World War II veteran who had been imprisoned in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and said the defendants “weren’t the kind of men you send to jail.”

The initial sentence was “a license to kill for $3,000, provided you have a steady job or are a student, and the victim is Chinese,” said Kin Yee, president of the Detroit Chinese Welfare Council.

Those initial charges served as a rallying cry. For the rest of the 1980s, lawyers appealed and re-fought the case, with each story raising the debate’s profile and the men and issues involved. Initially, the local American Civil Liberties Union and National Lawyers Guild declined to consider the matter as a civil rights case. Still, a new group called American Citizens for Justice did argue the beating was a civil rights case.

Throughout the 1980s, court and legislative battles raged over the case, including a federal civil rights case where the two were convicted and then cleared of civil rights charges and ordered to pay more than $1.5 million to Chin’s family.

The Chin beating also spurred the introduction of new hate crime laws. Asian-Americans began speaking out about being seen as “perpetual foreigners” after decades in America. A 1988 documentary on the case, “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” would be nominated for an Academy Award.

“What kind of law is this?” Chin’s mother, Lily, asked. “What kind of justice? This happened because my son is Chinese. If two Chinese killed a white person, they must go to jail, maybe for their whole lives... Something is wrong with this country.”

Highland Park and Detroit completely transformed

Like the surrounding city of Detroit, Highland Park felt incredible highs during the Big Three’s boom years and great devastation during the industry’s lows. Between 1910 and 1920, Highland Park, just 2.97 square miles, exploded from a rural town with 4,120 residents into a factory city with 46,500 residents. By 1980, that had fallen to 27,909 people, and by 2019, just 10,775 would remain.

A secret vigilante group related to the Ku Klux Klan called the Black Legion began in 1931, run by Highland Park’s Arthur Lupp. The Legion fought Catholics, Jews, blacks, and labor organizers. Its power ended after the 1936 murder of Charles Poole inspired a significant crackdown. Chin’s death seems to have inspired similar changes.

During the attack on Chin in 1982, World War II was just 40 years in the past, with some old hostilities dating back to the war with Japan lingering in the battle for car sales. Today, nearly 40 years after Chin’s beating, much has changed. The story is now part of numerous films and books, including a new one, From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry by Paula Yoo, due in April.

Yoo became a Detroit News reporter in 1992. She told Deadline Detroit, “The first question all my Asian-American friends, and especially my Asian-American journalist friends, asked, was ‘Are you scared to go to Detroit because of what happened to Vincent Chin?’ And I have to admit; I thought about that, too.”

The laws and attitudes changed significantly over the past four decades. Detroit’s Big Three now consider themselves global corporations, outsourcing productions and parts-making worldwide, so the definition of “American vs. foreign” is seldom argued anymore:

• General Motors, for example, sold 926,328 Buicks in China in 2020 versus 162,749 in the United States in 2020.
• Chrysler (who spoke the loudest about “buying American” in the 1980s) became a part of Italy’s Fiat during a 2009 bankruptcy. The two brands are part of the multi-national Stellantis N.V., headquartered in the Netherlands.
• China is now Ford’s second-largest market after the United States (617,000 vehicles sold in China versus 1.8 million).

Author and Ebens meet four decades after the infamous Chin beating

Yoo, the author of the new book about the Chin case, spent three hours with Ebens, who remains remorseful but contends his beating of Chin wasn’t racially motivated. Yoo called the meeting “one of the most profound, most intense experiences of my life as a journalist.”

“(Ebens) thinks it was a moment of too much alcohol and talk,” Yoo told Deadline Detroit. “I will say that meeting him taught me a lot about the fact that compassion and justice are not mutually exclusive. I cried in the car for about five minutes after I got out. I was just emotionally wiped out for the rest of the day. Nothing changed in terms of my point of view of the case. Do I think justice was not served? Of course, I do.”

Asian-Americans made up just 1.5 percent of the U.S. population in 1965 but are 6 percent today, overtaking Hispanics in 2009 as the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group. Pew Research says Asian-Americans now have higher incomes and are better educated than whites, blacks, or Latinos. Affirmative action helping certain minorities, a 2020 Justice Department case argued, actually penalizes Asians more than white or other races.

“According to the two defendants, they just snapped,” Wu told NPR. “That was their word. They just snapped and - for whatever reason. And we can’t look into their hearts or minds, but that’s why we should care about this case, that two people could take a baseball bat out of the trunk of their car and crack open someone’s head. Now, whatever the motivation, that’s a little more than a bar brawl.”

#StopAsianHate

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