National organizing in the AANHPI communities is the legacy of Vincent Chin

Graphic / Vincent Chin Institute

Detroit named a street after Vincent Chin to remember the Chinese American was beaten to death with a baseball bat.

On June 19, 1982, Chin went with friends to a Detroit strip club in to celebrate his upcoming wedding. That night, two white men who beat Chin even though their friends correctly identified him as Chinese, not Japanese. The attackers were autoworkers and at the time, there was an growing anti-Asian  sentiment because of the growing popularity of Japan-made cars in the US.

Even though the two men pleaded guilty at their trial, they judge fined them only $3,000 each and zero prison time. 

“These aren’t the kind of men you send to jail,” Kaufman said in defense of the sentences. “We’re talking here about a man who’s held down a responsible job for 17 or 18 years, and his son is employed and is a part-time student. You don’t make the punishment fit the crime, you make the punishment fit the criminal.”

The outrageously light sentence sparked national outrage and fueled a movement for pan-Asian American rights.

“People knew from personal experience that we were lumped together (by non-Asian Americans),” says Helen Zia, a Chinese American journalist who participated in civil rights activism in Detroit after Chin’s murder trial. “But in terms of identifying as pan-Asian, the key thing was that a man was killed because (his murderers thought) he looked like a different ethnicity.” Not only that, “his murderers got off on probation—in other words, scot-free,” she told the Detroit Free Press.

“These aren’t the kind of men you send to jail,” Kaufman said in defense of the sentences. “We’re talking here about a man who’s held down a responsible job for 17 or 18 years, and his son is employed and is a part-time student. You don’t make the punishment fit the crime, you make the punishment fit the criminal.”

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

Although Chin’s life was cut short at age 27, his death left an immense impact within Asian American communities locally and nationwide. His death and the court proceedings that followed are considered critical turning points for Asian American civil rights engagement. Within local and nationwide organizing, concerned community members and civil rights advocacy groups rallied for stronger federal hate crime legislation that protected Asian Americans. The public outcry to Vincent Chin’s murder contributed to the formation of Pan-Asian American identity and unity.

Fittingly, the Vincent Chin street is in Detroit's Chinatown. The city hopes to revitalize the ethnic enclave which has been hit with hard times recently.

“More than four decades later, Asian Americans continue to face discrimination, violence, and scapegoating,” said Thu Nguyen, Executive Director of OCA - Asian Pacific American Advocates. 

“The ongoing surge of anti-Asian hate, sparked by the pandemic and fueled by xenophobic rhetoric and policies from national leaders, echoes the same racism and scapegoating that led to Vincent Chin’s death. His story remains a stark reminder of the consequences of unchecked hate and a call to action to confront racism in all its forms.”

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