Romance and Race in the Jim Crow South

Emory University's Oxford College observed Emory Founders Week with a lecture by Dr. Andrew Urban, community research postdoctoral fellow with Emory University's Transforming Community Project. The lecture, entitled "Romance and Race in the Jim Crow South: Yun Ch'i-ho and the Personal Politics of Christian Reform," focused on Yun, who came to Emory, on the campus that is now Oxford College, in 1891 as a member of the 1893 graduating class. 

The lecture explored Yun's personal experiences at Emory and the observations he made during travels throughout Georgia and the South. His detailed diaries and personal correspondence touch on a wide-range of topics such as interracial dating, his views on Southern race relations and the social and moral obligations that white Christians had toward African Americans, and how Southerners reacted to his presence - as the first Korean most had ever encountered.  The lecture also assessed how Yun's treatment at Emory, and the personal tumult he experienced while in Georgia, may have influenced his later views and politics concerning race, missionary work and colonization, and Korean independence.  
Andy Urban received his PhD in US History from the University of Minnesota. He joined Emory University's Transforming Community Project as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2009.  In addition to his research on Yun Ch'i-ho and the involvement of Emory faculty, administrators, and alumni in Southern Methodist missionary work in Asia, Urban teaches a course on race and the American university.  Students from this course are curating an exhibit on the visual history of race that will open in May at Emory's Woodruff Library. Additionally, he is at work on an oral history project and photographic exhibition on the "day in a life" of an Emory worker.

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