Vincent Jen Chin was an American draftsman of Chinese descent who was killed in a racially motivated assault by two white men, Chrysler plant supervisor Ronald Ebens and his stepson, laid-off autoworker Michael Nitz. Ebens and Nitz assailed Chin following a brawl that took place at a strip club in Highland Park, Michigan, where Chin had been celebrating his bachelor party with friends in advance of his upcoming wedding. Against the backdrop of high anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States at the time – known as "Japan bashing" – they had assumed that Chin was Japanese, and a witness described them using anti-Asian racial slurs as they attacked him, ultimately beating Chin to death.
Dale Minami is a prominent Japanese American civil rights and personal injury lawyer based in San Francisco, California. He is best known for his work leading the legal team that overturned the conviction of Fred Korematsu, whose defiance of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II led to Korematsu v. United States, which is widely considered one of the worst and most racist Supreme Court decisions in American history.
OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates is a non-profit organization founded in 1973, whose stated mission is to advance the social, political, and economic well-being of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in the United States.
Ronald Madis Ebens is an American convicted killer. Ebens, with his stepson Michael Nitz as an accomplice, killed Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man, on June 19, 1982. This led to a federal indictment for violating Chin's civil rights, but only after public outrage at the probationary sentence and small fine imposed by Michigan Third Circuit Court Judge Charles Kaufman. Ebens was found guilty on one count of violating Chin's civil rights and was sentenced to 25 years in prison, but the conviction was overturned on appeal.
Charles Kaufman was an American judge for the Third Circuit Court of Michigan, with jurisdiction over south-east Michigan and its largest city, Detroit. He is known for sentencing Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz to probation for the 1982 killing of Vincent Chin in Detroit.
Renee Tajima-Peña is an American filmmaker whose work focuses on immigrant communities, race, gender and social justice. Her directing and producing credits include the documentaries Who Killed Vincent Chin?, No Más Bebés, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha, Calavera Highway, Skate Manzanar, Labor Women and the 5-part docuseries Asian Americans.
Grace Lee Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, she and James Boggs, her husband of some forty years, took their own political direction. By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press. She is regarded as a key figure in the Asian American, Black Power, and Civil Rights movements.
In 2002, there were 6,413 people of Japanese origin, including Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans, in the Wayne-Oakland-Macomb tri-county area in Metro Detroit, making them the fifth-largest Asian ethnic group there. In that year, within an area stretching from Sterling Heights to Canton Township in the shape of a crescent, most of the ethnic Japanese lived in the center. In 2002, the largest populations of ethnic Japanese people were located in Novi and West Bloomfield Township. In April 2013, the largest Japanese national population in the State of Michigan was in Novi, with 2,666 Japanese residents. West Bloomfield had the third-largest Japanese population and Farmington Hills had the fourth largest Japanese population.
As of 2002, ethnic Chinese and Chinese American people comprise the second-largest Asian-origin ethnic group in the Wayne–Macomb–Oakland tri-county area in Metro Detroit. As of that year there were 16,829 ethnic Chinese, concentrated mainly in Troy, Rochester Hills, and Canton Township. As of 2012, Madison Heights also hosts a significant Chinese community.
Young Corky Lee was a Chinese-American activist, community organizer, photographer, journalist, and the self-proclaimed unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate. He called himself an "ABC from NYC ... wielding a camera to slay injustices against APAs." His work chronicled and explored the diversity and nuances of Asian American culture often ignored and overlooked by mainstream media, striving to make Asian American history a part of American history.
Cecilia Chung is a civil rights leader and activist for LGBT rights, HIV/AIDS awareness, health advocacy, and social justice. She is a trans woman, and her life story was one of four main storylines in the 2017 ABC miniseries When We Rise about LGBT rights in the 1970s and 1980s.
Madeleine Lim is a filmmaker, producer, director, cinematographer and LGBTQ activist. She is the founding Executive Director of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP), and an adjunct professor of film studies at the University of San Francisco. Lim is also a co-founder of SAMBAL and the US Asian Lesbian Network in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Shivana Jorawar is an American lawyer, reproductive justice advocate, and community organizer. She is of Asian-American Indo-Caribbean heritage.
Christine Choy is a Chinese-American filmmaker. She is known for co-directing Who Killed Vincent Chin?, a 1988 film based on the murder of Vincent Jen Chin, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She co-founded Third World Newsreel, a film company focusing on people of color and social justice issues. As a documentary filmmaker, she has produced and directed more than eighty films. She is a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
June Chan is an American lesbian activist and biologist. The organizer and co-founder of the Asian Lesbians of the East Coast (ALOEC), Chan raised awareness for LGBT issues relating to the Asian-American community.
Asian American activism broadly refers to the political movements and social justice activities involving Asian Americans. Since the first wave of Asian immigration to the United States, Asians have been actively engaged in social and political organizing. The early Asian American activism was mainly organized in response to the anti-Asian racism and Asian exclusion laws in the late-nineteenth century, but during this period, there was no sense of collective Asian American identity. Different ethnic groups organized in their own ways to address the discrimination and exclusion laws separately. It was not until the 1960s when the collective identity was developed from the civil rights movements and different Asian ethnic groups started to come together to fight against anti-Asian racism as a whole.
National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum is a community-based non-profit organization based in Chicago and founded in 1996. They have offices in Atlanta and Washington, DC, as well as 15 chapters across the country. It is an organization that focuses on empowering AAPI women and girls to participate in critical decisions that affect their lives, families, and communities. NAPAWF uses a reproductive justice framework to motivate and push AAPI women to be involved in driving systemic change and policy in the United States.
Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is an American writer and educator based in Michigan and Hawai‘i.
American Citizens for Justice is an Asian American civil rights group formed in 1982 in Detroit, Michigan. While the Asian American movement was already developing in the West Coast of the United States, American Citizens for Justice was a significant force for a pan-Asian consciousness as part of the Asian American movement in the Midwest.
Lily Chin was a Chinese-American activist known for her attempts to seek legal proceedings for the death of her adopted son, Vincent Chin.
