Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American draftsman, was celebrating his coming wedding at the Fancy Pants club at 13843 Woodward Avenue in Highland Park on the night of 19 June 1982 when a fight broke out with two white men. Ronald Ebens was a Chrysler plant supervisor and Michael Nitz, his stepson, a laid-off autoworker. It was the depth of the recession in the car industry, and anger at Japanese imports had turned into open racism in Detroit, where politicians were blaming Japan for lost jobs. Ebens and Nitz assumed Chin was Japanese, and a witness described racial slurs as the men fought. Both groups were thrown out of the club. Ebens and Nitz went looking for Chin and found him outside a McDonald's on Woodward. Nitz held him while Ebens beat him with a baseball bat. Chin died four days later, on 23 June, the wedding five days off. Charged with second-degree murder, the two men bargained down to manslaughter, and Judge Charles Kaufman gave them three years' probation and a $3,000 fine, with no jail time. The outrage created a new movement. American Citizens for Justice was formed to fight the sentence, and federal civil rights charges followed. In 1984 a jury convicted Ebens and acquitted Nitz, but the conviction was overturned on appeal, and Ebens was acquitted at a retrial in 1987. Neither man served time in prison for the killing, and the case is regarded as a turning point for Asian American civil rights organizing.
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