1980s or any Asian American, we all felt like moving targets," said author Helen Zia, who was an unemployed autoworker of Chinese descent living in Detroit at the time of the Vincent Chin killing. "People who drove cars of Japanese models were shot at on the freeway. ... That's the climate I remember 35 years ago."

Shimoura said "it was a powder keg" of racial animosity that exploded at a bar Chin was at in Highland Park with friends to celebrate before his upcoming wedding. After a scuffle inside the bar, Ronald Ebens, who worked in the auto industry, and his stepson, Michael Nitz, later chased down Chin, smashing his head with a bat.

Zia helped mobilize the Asian-American community in metro Detroit after Chin's death, working with others totry to convince prosecutors to take the case seriously. The case united the region's small, diverse Asian-American communities: Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Indian and others. They held protests in Detroit and advocated for authorities to take Chin's death seriously.

Zia and other Asian-American activists said it was frustrating at first, with Wayne County prosecutors, federal prosecutors, the ACLU, and National Lawyers Guild in the early 1980s all reluctant to deal with the case. Even progressives at the time didn't feel that Asian-American issues were important causes, Zia said.

"What makes us feel that Vincent has not died in vain is that there has been a lot of policy changes" over the past 35 years, Zia said. "One of the questions before the federal civil rights trial was: Are Asian Americans