Wearing T-shirts reading “STOP ASIAN HATE,” a group of residents and activists arranged candles in the shape of a heart and displayed a portrait of Vincent Chin with his name written in Chinese and “May 18, 1955 — June 23, 1982” last month under the Chinatown Gate.

Wilson Lee, co-founder of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Boston Lodge and the Chinese American Heritage Foundation, said he and his wife Esther Zee Lee have organized a vigil for Chin every June 23 for six years.

“We’re in it for the long haul,” Lee said at the June 23 event. “Because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s the popular thing to do.”

A collection of local community leaders joined the remembrance, as did 16 Asian American elementary and high school students whom Lee described as “stakeholders.” They held orange lilies and yellow flowers pressed to their chests.

“We need to make sure that future generations, especially our young people, know about the experience that he went through,” Lee says.

Vincent Chin was a Chinese American draftsman whose tragic death became a catalyst for the Asian American civil rights movement. He was killed in 1982 in a racially motivated attack by Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, amid rising anti-Asian sentiment during the economic downturn of the early 1980s.