{"id":59615,"date":"2020-03-07T03:06:04","date_gmt":"2020-03-07T03:06:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59615"},"modified":"2020-03-07T03:06:04","modified_gmt":"2020-03-07T03:06:04","slug":"palmer-patton-recognized-as-earliest-identified-african-american-graduate-faculty-member-at-oregon-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59615","title":{"rendered":"Palmer Patton recognized as earliest identified African American graduate, faculty member at Oregon State"},"content":{"rendered":"

Palmer Patton recognized as earliest identified African American graduate, faculty member at Oregon State<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

OSU Today<\/a>
\nOregon State University<\/a>
\n2020-02-20<\/p>\n

Theresa Hogue<\/strong><\/a>, Public Info Representative<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nPalmer Patton<\/small><\/p>\n

Oregon State University archivist Larry Landis<\/a> was leafing through a 1919 Beaver Yearbook in 2018 as he did research on representations of blackface<\/a> in old university publications. As he looked for examples, he came across a yearbook photo of a student who appeared to be African American.<\/p>\n

As the director of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center<\/a>, Landis knew that officially, Carrie Halsell was considered the earliest identified African American graduate of Oregon State (at that time Oregon Agricultural College) in 1926. But the man in the photos, Palmer Patton, graduated from OAC with his bachelor\u2019s degree in 1918 and a master\u2019s degree in 1920. Landis investigated further.. He combed the university archives, online historic newspapers, and even accessed information through his personal Ancestry.com account. He also made inquiries with archives at other universities \u2013 Montana State University, UC Davis and the University of Chicago \u2013 all of which provided or confirmed information on Patton. He spent part of an afternoon in the archives at Montana State while in Bozeman<\/a> for a conference.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the course of several months I pieced together Palmer Patton’s story,\u201d Landis said. \u201cThe end result is a story of someone who was most likely bi-racial, who identified as white at times<\/a>, and who was able to navigate through places and spaces that were predominantly white.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cRacial \u201cpassing\u201d allowed light-skinned black Americans to sidestep racism faced by black people and claim the privilege of whiteness in public spaces,\u201d explained Dwaine Plaza, professor of sociology with the OSU School of Public Policy, who will be joining Landis during the Feb. 24 presentation. “The practice, writes historian Robert Fikes, Jr., was ‘seen by many African Americans as a way of outwitting the system of oppression and making laughable fools of those who countenanced notions of white racial purity and supremacy.’ The practice also alienated black peple from others of their culture because once they had gone over and claimed whiteness it was hard to go back – living between two worlds in hiding.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2895,459,8,6462,20],"tags":[30824,30823,5509,2325,30820,30822,19141,30821],"class_list":["post-59615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-campus-life","category-history","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-dwaine-plaza","tag-larry-landis","tag-oregon","tag-oregon-state-university","tag-osu-today","tag-palmer-patton","tag-robert-fikes-jr","tag-theresa-hogue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59615"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59617,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59615\/revisions\/59617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}