The Chinese American Museum presents “It Matters: Revisiting Vincent Chin and His Historic Impact on the Asian American Movement” on Tuesday, May 4, from 5 to 6 p.m. Pacific Time.
Paula Yoo, author of “From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement” (Norton Young Readers), sits down with Pam Ng, labor organizer and booktuber, to discuss Yoo’s extraordinary reserch from the trial following the tragic death of Vincent Chin and the resulting Asian American movement whose efforts continue to resonate in today’s racially explosive climate.
Register at http://camla.org/ItMatters
Co-presented by Act to Change, Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of Los Angeles, Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, East West Players, Eso Won Books, Grand Park, Japanese American National Museum, Nextshark, Norton Young Readers, and Visual Communications.
About the Book
A compelling account of the killing of Vincent Chin, the verdicts that took the Asian American community to the streets in protest, and the groundbreaking civil rights trial that followed.
America in 1982: Japanese car companies are on the rise and believed to be putting U.S. autoworkers out of their jobs. Anti-Asian American sentiment simmers, especially in Detroit. A bar fight turns fatal, leaving a Chinese American man, Vincent Chin, beaten to death at the hands of two white men, autoworker Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz.
Paula Yoo has crafted a searing examination of the killing and the trial and verdicts that followed. When Ebens and Nitz pled guilty to manslaughter and received only a $3,000 fine and three years’ probation, the lenient sentence sparked outrage. The protests that followed led to a federal civil rights trial — the first involving a crime against an Asian American — and galvanized what came to be known as the Asian American movement.
Extensively researched from court transcripts, contemporary news accounts, and in-person interviews with key participants, “From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry” is 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.
Yoo is an award-winning children’s picture book author and novelist, a prolific TV writer/producer, and a freelance violinist. “From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry” is her debut YA nonfiction book. She lives in Los Angeles.