From: nguyena@apple.com (Andy Nguyen)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Subject: Old News
Date: 26 Aug 92 23:02:29 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.

FYI,
Reposted without permission

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  10TH ANNIVERSARY OF RACIST SLAYING MARKED
  San Jose Mercury News  (SJ)  - Wednesday, June 24, 1992
  By: MIRANDA EWELL, Mercury News San Francisco Bureau
  Edition: Morning Final  Section: California News  Page: 3B
  Word Count: 490
 
  San Francisco -  Ten years after a young Chinese-American was beaten to 
death by two white autoworkers wielding baseball bats, Asian-American and other community leaders gathered Tuesday in Chinatown to remember Vincent Chin 
and decry a decade's lack of progress in racial harmony.
  
    "I come to this rally with a heavy sense of sorrow," said Henry Der, head 
of Chinese for Affirmative Action. "The L.A. riots taught us that hate is 
alive and well."
  
     Der was one of a number of speakers who recounted the events of Chin's 
death at a noon rally at Portsmouth Square, an unofficial center of the city's 
Chinese community. The gathering, one of several held in cities throughout 
the nation, was quiet and somber.
  
    Several speakers, including black civil-rights attorney Eva Paterson, 
alluded to continuing tension between Asians and blacks and urged greater 
understanding between the two groups.
  
    Against a backdrop of gray skies and steep high-rises, old men at the park 
paused in their public chess games and turned to listen to the speeches, which 
were translated from English to Cantonese for the bilingual crowd.
  
    Young people wearing yellow armbands stood attentively while pigeons 
wheeled overhead in slow circles.
  
    Harry Low, retired appellate court justice, recited a history of anti-
Chinese incidents in the city dating back a century.
  
    "This is not too new," Low said, speaking of Chin's death. "But what 
is new is the intensity of this hatred."
  
    On June 23, 1982, Chin, a 27-year-old Detroit resident, was celebrating 
with friends at a bar on the eve of his marriage. Two unemployed autoworkers 
called Chin "Jap," blamed him for the auto industry's downturn, and clubbed him to death with a baseball bat. They received three years' probation and 
paid a $3,000 fine for the killing. The judge who sentenced them said they 
"weren't the kind of people you sent to jail."
  
    While the Chin killing and his killers' sentencing never sparked the furor 
that followed the Rodney King verdict, it galvanized many Asian-Americans and 
led to the formation of a number of civil-rights organizations that have 
monitored anti-Asian attacks.
  
    According to numerous civil-rights groups, racially motivated hate crimes 
have steadily increased during the past decade, and Tuesday's speakers mentioned several incidents.
  
    In 1983, Thong Hy Huynh, a Vietnamese-American high school student, was 
stabbed to death in Davis following months of racial harassment. In 1989, 24-
year-old Jim Loo was killed by two brothers in Raleigh, N.C., who said they had lost a brother in Vietnam. In August 1990, 15-year-old Hung Truong was 
kicked to death in Houston by teen-age skinheads.
  
    At a news conference preceding the rally, Dennis Hayashi, executive 
director of the Japanese-American Citizens League, said Monday's U.S. Supreme 
Court ruling striking down a Minnesota law against cross burning was another 
indication that the courts were "not something the Asian-American 
community can depend on to achieve justice."
  
                   Copyright 1992, San Jose Mercury News