We read.

For two months we read an array of articles from the Georgia Historical Quarterly, on various topics in Georgia history from the Civil War to the early 1970s. During this time, we were each seeking to become well-read in our respective areas of interest, often guided through the sources by our professor, Dr. David Parker. Then around the end of September, we stopped meeting to discuss articles and hypothetical topics and started using that class time to scour the archives, the library, and the research databases we’d used to much less extent in previous classes: we had to come up with a thesis and flesh it out into a contextual and well-argued history thesis by Dec. 7.

No pressure.

Young J. Allen in his early twenties; he mentions in a letter to his aunt and uncle (who raised him) that he stopped shaving his beard at the outset of the American Civil War. It is apparent that he never picked up the habit again. (Photos courtesy MARBL, Emory.)

I had arrived in this class at the eleventh hour, signing up about two weeks before the start of fall semester– and without one last prerequisite class I needed. And in fact it was quite surprising to some of my history major friends that I would end up in a Georgia History senior seminar after spending college studying Asia. But several weeks earlier, in mid-July, Dr. Parker and I had found a way to combine these two seemingly unrelated regions: Young John Allen.

Young J. Allen (yes, Young is his first name, not a kindly prefix) graduated from Emory College when it was just a newly-founded school in Oxford, Georgia, and spent his life as a Methodist missionary in Shanghai, China. He left the United States in Dec. 1859 and remained in the Far East until his death there in 1907. His manuscript collection as well as a large library of his own books reside at Emory University in Atlanta, deeming Allen the subject of a day’s trek over to the archives at their Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL). What started as a fun mini-project for my summer class (which I also took with Dr. Parker) would have to become my senior thesis topic; when else was I going to find a subject that would so perfectly blend documents in Georgia and three years’ worth of my knowledge about Chinese culture, language, politics, and religion? Plus, I was raised Methodist, so I would get to know a little more about that history to boot.

What I would discover was much more than the life, failures, and triumphs of Young J. Allen and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in China, but simply how enthralling it is to pour over documents that he poured over more than a century earlier. Call me a dork, or a call me a historian, but it felt utterly like touching history. Thankfully, he had somewhat legible handwriting, so I read what I could of his hand-written letters, journals, sermons, and notes for the books he wrote. It felt romantic in the way it seems when you read The Historian and follow a generation of historians across Cold War Europe in search of Vlad Tepes (the prince who inspired tales of Dracula) but also monotonous in the way that you feel work must inevitably be. The result is a happy medium, a wholly rewarding experience and with any luck, worthwhile when you sit down to write.

What did I find?

Allen would spend his life devoted to not only evangelism but the added social goals of education, journalism, writing, and translating.

I found a man inspired by God, baffled by Confucius, and bound to pragmatism. The state of the young Methodist mission was sad when he arrived, and much as he tried to expand it, the American Civil War stole any hope of support or funding from abroad. Allen and his fellow missionary J. W. Lambuth spent nearly a decade working odd jobs to keep themselves afloat. Their families were present in Shanghai too; in fact, Allen had six children with his wife Mary Houston Allen, but only three survived past toddlerhood. By the time funding returned in any sense, Allen had made his own revelation about Chinese society. The non-receptive citizens he’d been preaching to had been anything but successful; but the young men he taught while working at a government school seemed just the type, the upper class families, who may have more influence in a hierarchical Confucian society. Maybe, he decided, reaching these people first and educating them in western subjects (including but not exclusively Christianity) could later influence more people through the top-down formation of their citizenship. These people would not only receive the accompanying western education that Allen considered paramount, but might have more success at reaching the laypeople with whom he’d become so disenchanted.

Allen spent the rest of his life working to varying degrees in education in Shanghai. The Anglo-Chinese College, Shanghai would eventually merge with two others to become Suzhou University in 1901, which had been one of his life’s goals. He would also play his hand in journalism and publishing, using his Wan-kuo kung-pao magazine to propel a combination of world and national news, essays on religion, and attacks on Confucian lifestyle. He contributed many translations of tomes on politics and religion, including The Relations Between East and West that was popular among his colleagues and governmental gentry. He wrote several books of his own as well, including one that you can find on Google Books today (by the way, it’s in Chinese!). While he did not abandon his evangelistic goals, he expanded those initial plans by adding his social missions to his ambitious strategy to win converts. He wound up somewhere in between fully accepting Confucian society and fully condemning it, and allowed students to learn about Christianity in a non-pressured way. At the end of the day, he saw both mental and spiritual parts of man to be significant.

My thesis touches on this and other aspects of what made Allen a combination of the two worlds of missionary work that grew out of that late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as Americans and other missionaries encountered reluctant natives in the field; a strong camp of traditional strictly evangelical missionaries would go forth alongside the newer social progress proponents. It wound up being around 8000 words (thirty pages double-spaced). I had an embarrassing number of library books checked out from mine and other university libraries across Georgia.

It was an incredible exercise in being a historian. Almost every person in my ten-student class ended up spending at least a few days in an archive somewhere in Georgia, from Emory to Koinonia Farm and in between. What any of these theses will become in the future remains to be seen, but I think we all felt like historians during those months. I am one of the only living experts on Young J. Allen, and I think that’s pretty darn cool.

Animosity towards Japanese during WWII

America has its own ghosts, which we often brush under the rug much as any other country, because who wants to remember how we forced Japanese-Americans out of their communities and  into internment camps while we blasted a cultural homeland some of them had never even visited? Well the patriotic Japanese-Americans who lived through it sure want you to…

It can be easier to point to other countries and cultures and say, “But look at what they’re doing to their own people! That’s much worse than our past.” But the problem here is the disconnect that exists between our history and what the average American knows about it; and the misinformation that runs rampant when you have sports coaches teaching your high school history classes. Our own people have also suffered under legislation that in hindsight seems unbelievable.

The United States had another demon from its WWII past that was finally given its proper recognition in 2007. The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African-American pilots in the U. S. military, and they fought in the war in the south European and North African front, earning a stellar flight record with very small losses. Then they returned to a homeland that subscribed to Jim Crow traditions of discrimination and racism. In fact, although many of these pilots were even more extensively trained than their white counterparts (due to disbelief in their abilities), many of these men returned home and could not find employment in the commercial aviation field. Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson reported that he was treated better as a POW of Germany than he was treated in his own state of Mississippi. Read that again. Now remember that we’re talking about the most brutal war in human history, which he willing went to fight for a segregated United States. And the most ironic and tragic thing of all: he had to fight even to earn that opportunity.

When war was looming, the United States military realized they had an entire segment of the population that it need to utilize, the African-American men and women who were ready and willing to serve. The “Tuskegee Experiment” that grew out of this was deemed a failure before it had even fully begun, as black men were literally seen to be incapable of handling the complicated process of flying a plane, as reported in the War College Report of 1925. Eugenics and other notions of a hierarchy of intelligence were rampant during the first few decades of the twentieth century, but it is somewhat shocking that they were still considered pertinent, influential–and, worst, of substance or truth–by the start of the second world war.

G. I. Washington, Dr. Frederick Peterson, and Charles "Chief" Anderson. This photo appears in the exhibit, courtesy Tuskegee University.

G. I. Washington, Dr. Frederick Peterson, and Charles "Chief" Anderson. This photo appears in the exhibit, courtesy Tuskegee University.

The Airmen had a lot to be proud of though, they fought their “Double V Campaign” (victory both on the war front and at home) with honor and tenacity; only one of the Vs came to fruition. And then for over half a century proper credit was not given. The pilots and their ground crew were at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement by a decade or more. The men founded Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. (TAI) in the early ’70s and it continues to have annual conferences and has welcomed “torch-bearers” into their ranks to carry on the legacy of the Airmen and their stories. Several of the Airmen have written books (unfortunately when you search Amazon, top results are the 1995 Laurence Fishburne film…).

Bill Clinton, during his presidency, commissioned a national historic site to be established on Moton Field in Tuskegee, Ala. where the men had done some of their training; that historic site opened in 2008. Several exhibits exist currently on various military bases around the South. And opening Nov. 17, 2009 is a traveling exhibit created by students in the Public History program at Kennesaw State University (I am one of those students) in partnership with the school’s Museum of History and Holocaust Education and Tuskegee University. The coordinators of the Public History program, Drs. Dickey and Lewis, were the overseers of the entire project, and it has turned into our own little legacy. In 2007, President Bush awarded the Tuskegee Airmen the Congressional Medal of Honor, finally recognizing in the federal record books the amazing obstacles incurred and bravery maintained by all graduates of the Tuskegee aviation program during WWII. The honor also shed greater light on the legacy of TAI and the scholarships and public services they have provided since the group’s inception.

Invitation

"The Tuskegee Airmen: The Segregated Skies of WWII" opens Nov. 17, 2009.

I am proud to have been a part of curating this exhibit on the Airmen. “The Tuskegee Airmen: The Segregated Skies of WWII” is a traveling, collapsible exhibit consisting of ten panels that tell the story, with photos courtesy of Tuskegee University, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives. It opens Tuesday, Nov. 17 at the KSU Center, and will be on display there until Feb. 28, 2010. I am very excited about the opening, and some of the original Airmen from the Atlanta chapter of TAI will be attending. (As a side note, my mom made me an incredible black Donna Karen design dress. Perfection for a co-curator.) If you live in the area, stop by and see it. After that, it will be traveling to various schools and organizations; the Airmen even want to bring it to their annual conference next year. What an amazing thing to have as my own tiny legacy at KSU, one that will potentially reach 50,000 people over its lifespan, according to Dr. Catherine Lewis, the museum’s director.

The Tuskegee Airmen waited a long to time to be acknowledged for their military service and impressive record in WWII. The United States has its own ghosts, but I like to hope in time, they can all be laid in the open and understood for their good and bad. I’m surprised by how many people I find who don’t know who the Tuskegee Airmen were. I hope this exhibit inspires people through their story.

Below will be, at the end, the journal entries I write each week regarding my thoughts on class discussion, readings, and project development. The brief entries will chronicle each week of the class and the exhibit progress, until its opening on Nov. 17. By that date, I will be more knowledgeable about public history and capable of working on historical projects to benefit the community. And you’re invited to the opening.

Week 2:

The more I read about putting together exhibits, the more excited I am to be part of a team that is putting one together. Having never really dug into the field of public history before, I am excited to see the impact public historians can impress on the community in which they work. It it such a subtle art. It is trying to teach people something without them realizing it, really; and it is making the information user-friendly and painstakingly clear. What an exciting challenge.

I have also been met with two separate and equally exciting reactions when I mention this class assignment. The first is, “Who are the Tuskegee Airmen?” This offers the obvious satisfaction of being able to explain, and then invite the friend/coworker/classmate/parent to visit the exhibit when it opens. The other reaction has been, “What a great topic! I know a guy who knows one of them…” While this second one has obviously been less often, I was still able to learn about those several people who were very knowledgeable about the Airmen and learn a little about their perception of and thoughts about them. One of my coworkers in particular knew an Airmen that had lived next door to him in Alabama several years ago, and offered his phone number for a chat. Potential conversation, respectfully declined but with a open invitation should I want to speak with him later. Overall, my discussion with people has given me the inspiration to really make this an exhibit people can take with them when they leave, in the form of a powerful, lasting memory.

I have also been giving the titles some thought, and am looking forward to seeing where everyone else has wound up after mulling over last week’s brainstorming session. We made some great progress, and my notes were full of thought-provoking panel topics. Looking forward to developing our plan further on Tuesday.