"Cherry Blossoms Among Magnolias?": A History of the Asian American Experience at Duke

Yasuko Ueno, the first student of Asian descent to graduate from Duke (Class of 1925), as shown in the 1925 Chanticleer.

Eiko Yonemura (Class of 1927) was also described by her classmates in Chanticleer through a Orientalist mindset.

Owen K. Ough (Duke University Class of 1929) clearly knew his Elizabethan playwrights. From the 1929 Chanticleer.

Reminders of the Jim Crow racial hierarchy could even be found in Chanticleer, as evidenced by this page from the 1930 yearbook.

In 1924, James Buchanan Duke who had made his fortune in tobacco famously gave $40 million of his fortune to Trinity College to transform the small, provincial liberal arts college into a national research university. The new institution that grew out of Trinity College, christened Duke University, started to attract students from outside the Carolinas, including a few from Asia.

The first known student of Asian descent to graduate from the newly created Duke University was Yasuko Ueno of Hiroshima, Japan who graduated in 1925.^[1] Like the Asian international students who had attended the institution during its Trinity College days, Duke’s Asian students from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were most likely exoticized and Orientalized by the classmates, as evidenced by The Chanticleer’s descriptions of two of Duke’s Asian graduates.

1. Report, “Task Force Proposal for the Improvement of the Asian and Asian American Student Experience,” [2000], Box 1, Asian Student Association Records, Duke University Archives, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.