Fighting Anti-Asian Discrimination in Nineteenth Century Greenwich Village: A Guided Tour

UPDATE: All tours are sold-out and have reached full capacity. We do not maintain waitlists for our programs. Should additional tickets become available due to cancellations, they will be automatically released on Eventbrite.

Following the passage of the 1882 Exclusion Acts, thousands of Chinese Americans moved to New York City to escape the increase of racist violence sweeping the nation. Once here, they formed new organizations to defend their rights and assert their interests. While most of this took place in what would become Chinatown, Greenwich Village was also a center for Chinese American organizing in the late 1800s. Join A/P/A Institute at NYU Visiting Scholar Dylan Yeats for a guided tour of sites between Washington Square and Cooper Square, where Chinese American immigrant-rights activists lived and worked 130 years ago, and learn how their victories and defeats continue to resonate today. This hour-long outdoor accessible tour will begin at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU (8 Washington Mews), and will be offered at 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 24 and Thursday, April 25.

“Fighting Anti-Asian Discrimination in Nineteenth Century Greenwich Village: A Guided Tour” is a program celebrating the Greenwich Village Historic District Fiftieth Anniversary with the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

Note on accessibility: The meeting point is accessible via elevator. Restrooms are single-stalled, and all gender. The hour-long outdoor tour is accessible and fully outdoors. 

Dylan Yeats holds a doctorate in US History from NYU. His work focuses on how the politics of “culture war” have shaped Americans’ understandings of race, gender, and religion from the colonial period to the present day. Yeats co-edited Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (Verso Press, 2014) with John Kuo Wei Tchen, and is currently working on a book, based on his dissertation, about how religious conflict between Protestant sects in the early nineteenth century shaped the very foundations of US political culture and practice. Yeats is a committed public historian and trained archivist. He has curated and consulted on numerous exhibits and public memory projects in New York City, where he also gives occasional walking tours as a licensed sightseeing guide.

Image: Certificate of Residence for Sun Yow Pang, 1894; Yoshio Kishi and Irene Yah-Ling Sun Collection; MSS 292; box 6; folder 38; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.