Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the Seattle Times

"Passing Strange:" racial deception in the name of love

"Passing Strange" is historian Martha Sandweiss' strange but true tale of an accomplished 19th-century white man who "passed" for black so he could marry his true love, a black woman.


By Bruce Ramsey
Special to The Seattle Times
Thursday, March 12, 2009; Seattle Times

In the late 1800s, Clarence King was a figure of public renown. He was a mining consultant with jobs all over North America. He had founded the U.S. Geological Survey, mapped part of the Sierra Nevada, argued in journals of geology about the age of the Earth, hobnobbed with the secretary of state and dined in the White House. He was also a white man who had a secret life in which he pretended to be black.

In "Passing Strange," Martha Sandweiss, professor of history at Princeton University, undertakes to tell the story of King's secret marriage to an African-American woman.

A modern reader will ask how a white man with light hair and blue eyes could pass as "colored" for 13 years. A reader of Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson," written in 1894, will know: Anyone with one drop of "African blood," no matter what he looked like, was considered colored. Such a person might pass as white, but he was breaking the "one-drop rule."

King undertook to pass as black. At 47, he met Ada Copeland, 28, a nursemaid, telling her he was a Pullman porter named James Todd. He married her and they became Mr. and Mrs. Todd, while his associates continued to know him as the famed geologist Clarence King, resident of a Manhattan hotel.

In an age with no TV, few published photographs and no worry about driver's licenses, bank cards or computer databases, he could get away with it. The America of that time offered less racial tolerance but more privacy.

For the full review, click here.