Nearly 40 years ago, a Metro Times reporter helped turn the killing of Vincent Chin into a movement for Asian American rights

On June 19, 1982, 27-year-old Vincent Chin was celebrating his bachelor party when two white men fatally bludgeoned him with a baseball bat outside of a crowded Highland Park McDonald’s. He died four days later at Henry Ford Hospital. The case was initially covered locally as a barroom brawl gone bad.