From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: Part II

According to the Michigan Penal Code 750.321, the felony of manslaughter was defined as "criminally negligent homicide"—the unintentional killing of another person resulting from recklessness or criminal negligence.

What made manslaughter different from murder was that the person had no intention of killing the other person. Accidents, poor judgment, and bad luck often resulted in manslaughter, from drunk driving to a fight that got out of control.

A World War II air force navigator who had survived a prisoner of war camp in Japan, Kaufman was known for being lenient on first-time offenders with no prior records.

Judge Kaufman had “perused” the transcript of the preliminary hearing from October 1982 before Judge Bayles, and he asked the defense attorneys to "refresh his memory."

“Your Honor, Mr. Ebens and Mr. Nitz were seated, and the victim walked up and punched Mr. Ebens in the mouth, initiating the physical assault," said Ebens's lawyer, Bruce Saperstein.

What Judge Kaufman didn't hear, however, and what he apparently did not pick up from his "perusal” of the preliminary hearing transcript, were the very different accounts of Gary Koivu, Robert Siroskey, and Jimmy Choi, nor did he have access to the statements that the other witnesses had given to the police that also contradicted the accounts given by Ebens and his lawyers.

"During the melee inside, my stepson received a head injury plus I was bleeding from the mouth," Ebens told Judge Kaufman at the hearing.

"[The killing] was not so much an act that was willful or with any specific intent to commit any crime, but a tragedy of major proportion,” Nitz's lawyer, Edward Khoury, told Judge Kaufman.

Judge Kaufman did not hear the statement made to the police by one witness that Ebens and Nitz had allegedly paid him twenty dollars to help them find Vincent, which was not in the preliminary hearing transcript (since he had not testified) and which made Ebens's eventual encounter with Vincent sound less coincidental and more premeditated.

Growing up, her father had told Lily stories of hardship and bigotry that her great-grandfather endured in America during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Chinese railroad workers would drill a hole into mountainous rock, pour black dynamite powder into it, then light a fuse. They had only a few moments to run as far away as they could before the flame made contact with the powder, causing a detonation. It was a crude and unpredictable process that killed many men.

Better to risk the life of a "Chinaman" rather than their more valued white counterparts, the company bosses reasoned.

He received many letters and photos of prospective brides in China.

Vincent had a cheerful disposition and an ability to make friends on first sight.

Lily remembered how, almost a hundred years earlier, her great-grandfather, along with other Chinese laborers, had risked his life, transporting and setting off volatile dynamite to blow up tunnels through solid mountain rock.

As a journalist, Zia knew she had to remain impartial and hear all sides of the story before drawing any conclusions.

How a frenzied mob of five hundred white men had lynched and murdered eighteen Chinese immigrants in a Los Angeles Chinatown on October 24, 1871, after a white man was accidentally killed in gun crossfire during a dispute between two Chinese men.

How 120,000 Japanese Americans had lost everything when their own government forced them from their homes and imprisoned them during World War II in "relocation centers” (later referred to as "internment camps” and "concentration camps”).

Like Zia, both men had been surprised to see a photo of two young Asian Americans featured so prominently in the local newspapers.

The majority of Chinese immigrants living in Chinatown were working class. Many of them hailed from South China and worked in laundries and restaurants.

In the 1970s he helped write and deliver letters on behalf of the league to demand individual reparations for the 120,000 Japanese Americans who were illegally imprisoned during World War II.

In a rare public statement, she told The Detroit News that she did not believe Judge Kaufman's rationale behind the lenient sentence—that Ebens and Nitz deserved probation instead of jail time because they had no prior criminal records.

Meanwhile the Chinese population boomed out in the suburbs, thanks to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, in which the U.S. government could no longer put a limit on the number of Chinese and other Asian immigrants allowed to move into the country. This new federal law nullified the earlier Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first U.S. law to prevent immigration to America on the basis of a person's race.

The mom-and-pop curio stores and Chinese restaurants began to fold, due to declining business.

But in the back room, the mood was muted and solemn.

And all the lawyers said, once the sentence is rendered, there's nothing we can do.

She was frustrated by the tunnel vision of these lawyers, whom she felt were too boxed in by legal technicalities and logic and were unable to see the forest for the trees.

Lily's plea inspired Zia's activist zeal from her Princeton University days. She realized she could no longer sit by and be a witness. She had to do something.

So on March 20, 1983, Helen Zia, Henry Yee, Kin Yee, Roland Hwang, James Shimoura, Lily Chin, and the other couple of dozen Asian Americans sitting in that back room of a modest Chinese restaurant agreed that this was not okay. They would no longer be silent.

Jarod realized his parents had never talked to him about racism. They never prepared him for what would inevitably happen as he grew older.