[December 9th
marks the 145th anniversary of P.B.S.
Pinchback assuming the Louisiana governorship, making him the first
African American governor in U.S. history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
five figures from the Reconstruction era, leading up to a special post on
Pinchback himself!]
On whether and
how to remember the pioneering educator as a Reconstruction figure.
If Yung Wing isn’t the American historical
figure about whom I’ve written the most in my career to date—in this
space, in numerous
public scholarly
pieces elsewhere,
and in a chapter of my
third book, among other places—he’s definitely on the short list. As a
result, I’ve considered him through a pretty wide variety of lenses, including
Chinese and Asian American histories, the histories of immigration, immigration
law, and diversity in America, how we can better remember a historic site and
story like those of Hartford’s
Chinese Educational Mission, and the concept of critical
patriotism. But even though that Chinese
Educational Mission opened in 1872—and even though, as I wrote earlier in
the week, the Reconstruction period as a whole focused a good deal on education
and its interconnections with cultural and social progress—I’ve never before thought
at length about whether that crucial part of Yung’s life and career could or
should be linked to Reconstruction in any meaningful way.
My initial
instinct, on multiple levels, is to say that it shouldn’t be. Just because an
event happens at a particular time doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s related
to others from the same time, or even to overarching histories and narratives
in that period. More specifically, Reconstruction’s overarching histories
focused on the myriad aftermaths of both the Civil War and slavery; while Chinese Americans did fight
in the Civil War, including a pair of slave-owning
conjoined twins who fought for the Confederacy, I would nonetheless argue
that the war did not change Chinese American communities and histories in any
specific or promiment way (no more than it did the entirety of the nation, at
least). To put it another way, Reconstruction’s efforts and questions were
closely intertwined with a particular cultural community, African Americans;
linking the period to Chinese Americans would seem perilously close to assuming
that all Americans of color are necessarily parallel to one another. Moreover,
one of the era’s most significant national laws, the Naturalization
Act of 1870 (an extension of the 14th Amendment’s concept of “birthright
citizenship”), overtly excluded
Asian Americans from its purview, an explicit attempt to highlight the law’s
more narrow application to African Americans (especially those born into
slavery).
The complex
histories comprised by that last sentence can also be read another way,
however. It’s entirely possible to see the Reconstruction period as centrally
defined by debates and battles over who has full membership in an American community,
along with concurrent questions such as how to move particular communities
toward such equality. Those debates and questions were certainly particularly
salient and fraught when it came to African Americans, but similar tensions and
challenges could also be present for other communities, including former
Confederates but also other cultural groups such as Asian Americans. Moreover,
if education was one of the most consistently advocated paths to African
American equality and progress, then Yung’s Chinese Educational Mission might
well be seen as a concurrent Reconstruction-era effort to create an educational
institution that could help another cultural community become more fully and
equally part of America. And moreover moreover, the opposition to the CEM that
became part of the move toward the Chinese Exclusion Act could thus be read as parallel
to the (nationwide) resurgence
of white supremacy that contributed so mightily to the failure of
Reconstruction. All of which is to say, broadening our vision of Reconstruction
to include Yung and the CEM doesn’t have to mean forgetting or minimizing any
other histories, and could even help us understand another layer to them.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Reconstruction figures or stories you’d highlight?
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