Killing That Galvanized Asian-Americans Remembered : Civil rights: Diverse group meets to reflect on the changes that the 1982 slaying in Detroit prompted.

A decade ago, a young Chinese-American man celebrating his impending wedding was beaten to death outside a Detroit-area bar by two white auto workers who thought he was Japanese.

The assailants were never sent to jail, but the case galvanized Asian-Americans across the country. “It was our defining moment,” said Los Angeles Human Relations Commission Director Ron Wakabayashi, as they united to fight bigotry and injustice.

On Monday, Wakabayashi joined a diverse group of Chinese-, Japanese- and Korean-Americans who gathered at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo to commemorate the Chin killing and reflect on the lasting changes it created among Asian-Americans.

To many Asian-Americans, the Chin case parallels more recent incidents, such as the Rodney G. King beating, the sentencing of Soon Ja Du for the killing of Latasha Harlins, and the destruction of many Asian-American businesses in the Los Angeles riots.

“Like the Rodney King case . . . we too have been victims of the justice system,” said Stewart Kwoh, president of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, a sponsor of the event.

“The kind of racist violence we saw in that case hasn’t stopped. It’s gotten worse,” said Jerry Yu, head of the Korean-American Coalition, another sponsor of the event, which included a panel discussion and a screening of a 1988 documentary, “Who Killed Vincent Chin?”

One purpose of the 10-year perspective, he said, was “we don’t want to let anyone forget. We want to make sure we are vigilant in fighting racism wherever it appears.”

Chin was killed in 1982 by Ron Ebens after they argued at a topless bar. Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz, thought Chin was Japanese and blamed him for problems in the U.S. auto industry.

Outside the bar, Nitz held Chin while Ebens fatally beat him. The two men pleaded guilty to manslaughter. A judge sentenced them to probation and fined them each $3,700.

After intense lobbying by Asian-American groups, Ebens was prosecuted in federal court and convicted of violating Chin’s civil rights. But a federal appeals court threw out that conviction.

In a second trial--moved to Cincinnati because of the extensive publicity in Detroit--a largely white jury acquitted Ebens. “Just to the Rodney King case,” Kwoh said, “there was a change of venue and a jury acquitted him because they didn’t understand the racist motivations.”

Yu said the original judge’s decision to sentence Ebens only to probation infuriated Asian-Americans, just as the probation granted Korean-American grocer Soon Ja Du for the killing of a black teen-ager incensed Los Angeles’ African-American community.

“The (Detroit) judge said these are not the type of people we put in prison,” he said. “Similar to what African-Americans have been saying about the Soon Ja Du sentence, (the Chin case) says Asian-American lives have no meaning.”

Irvin Lai, a Los Angeles businessman who headed the Chinese American Citizens Alliance when the Chin case occurred, was one of those who traveled to Washington to press for civil rights charges against Ebens.

The same bigotry that motivated the attack on Chin operates today, he said. “In the recent riots, people were pulled out of their cars and beaten because people thought they were Korean. A person sees only a yellow face . . . We have to learn from this.”

In the aftermath of the Chin case, Asian-American groups began to work together and developed national networks to respond to incidents of bigotry.

Kwoh said attorneys at his center joined the legal efforts in Detroit to prosecute Ebens. Since then, he and other Asian-Americans lawyers have worked to develop greater legal expertise in civil rights issues, to “assist communities and victims in need.”

“The real tragedy was not only did the two killers never serve a day in jail,” Kwoh said, but what happened to Chin’s immigrant mother, who gave up on the American system, “Mrs. Chin moved back to China about four years ago,” Kwoh said. “To me, that was a real sad ending.”