From a whisper to a rallying cry: the killing of Vincent Chin and the trial that galvanized the Asian American movement

A compelling account of the murder of Vincent Chin, the verdicts that took America's Asian American community to the streets in protest of injustice, and the civil rights trial that followed. In 1982 America, Japanese car companies were on the rise and believed to be putting American autoworkers out of their jobs. Anti-Asian American sentiments simmered, especially in Detroit. A bar fight turned fatal, leaving Vincent Chin—a Chinese-American man—beaten to death at the hands of two white men, autoworker Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz. In the trial and verdicts that followed, Ebens and Nitz pled guilty to manslaughter and received only a $3,000 fine and three years' probation. The lenient sentence sparked outrage in and galvanized the Asian American community, paving the way for a new federal civil rights trial of the case, the first involving a crime against an Asian American. Extensively researched from court transcripts and interviews with key case witnesses, many speaking for the first time, Yoo has crafted a suspenseful, nuanced, and authoritative portrait of a pivotal moment in civil rights history, and a man who became a symbol against hatred and racism.