June 23, 1982: Vincent Chin dies.
On June 19, thirty years ago, a Chinese-American man named Vincent Chin was confronted by two white autoworkers in a strip club (where Chin was celebrating his bachelor party). The two men, Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz, blamed Chin for continuing unemployment; Ebens reportedly yelled “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work!”, in reference to the competing American and Japanese auto industries.
Later that day, the two men cornered Chin outside a McDonald’s, where they beat him with a baseball bat. Chin was knocked unconscious; he died four days later in a hospital, at age twenty-seven. Ebens and Nitz pled guilty to second-degree murder. They were fined $3,000 dollars and sentenced to three years probation.
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