The Spark of Recognition

PETER ONUF: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

MATT LAUER: Are you an African American woman?

RACHEL DOLEZAL: I identify as black.

PETER ONUF: That’s white civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal, speaking with NBC’S Matt Lauer last June. Dolezal set off a media firestorm for passing as black, but she was hardly the first white American to do so. Take the 19th century explorer, Clarence King, a famous white man in public.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: And then he would go home to his African American wife and five children in Brooklyn, who believed him to be a black Pullman porter named James Todd.

PETER ONUF: Today on BackStory, Color Lines. We’ll explore the people who have bent or just not fit into America’s rigid racial rules.

EVA GARROUTTE:: So whereas one drop of white blood does not make you white, one drop of Indian blood does not make you Indian. But, by golly, one drop of African blood will make you black.

PETER ONUF: Coming up on BackStory, a history of racial passing. Don’t go away.

Major funding for BackStory is provided by the Shere Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

MALE SPEAKER: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN BALOGH: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER ONUF: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN BALOGH: And Ed Ayers is with us.

ED AYERS: Hey, guys. We’re going to start today’s show in 1843 and a chance encounter in a New Orleans cafe. A German woman known as Madame Carl sat down for a refreshment when an enslaved woman named Sally Miller came over to serve her. Madame Carl was shocked.

CAROL WILSON: She recognizes Sally as a fellow German with whom she had emigrated to this country 25 years earlier.

ED AYERS: This is historian Carol Wilson. She says that Madame Carl set out to prove that Miller was a long lost German girl named Salome Muller whose family had vanished after arriving in the States.

CAROL WILSON: And they go to the homes of several other Germans in the city. And all of them identify Sally, they recognize her, as either a little girl who they had traveled here with named Salome Muller, or they recognize her more generally as one of the Muller family.

ED AYERS: This chance encounter produce a high profile court case with Sally Miller seizing her new German identity.

CAROL WILSON: Sally decides to sue for her freedom on the grounds that she is, in fact, not an African American slave but is, in fact, a free white woman of German descent and was held illegally in slavery.

ED AYERS: Today it might seem remarkable that the case even went to trial. How could there be any confusion over whether someone was an African American slave or a European immigrant? But Wilson reminds us that New Orleans had a large racially mixed population, with enslaved and free people tracing their ancestry to Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and often some combination of the three. As a result, it was sometimes hard to tell who was black or white, slave or free. And that was apparently true of the dark-haired, hazel-eyed Sally Miller.

CAROL WILSON: She’s not African looking, but neither are many, many slaves in New Orleans, or for that matter, in other parts of the United States. So it becomes apparent during the course of the trial that seeing someone enslaved who looks light scanned or looks white is not shocking to people.

ED AYERS: After years in court, Sally eventually won her freedom and was legally recognized as Salome Muller. The presiding judge declared that, quote, “If the plaintiff is not the real lost child, it is certainly one of the most extraordinary things in history.”

PETER ONUF: But Wilson says this extraordinary coincidence is probably the truth. Sally Miller wasn’t the long lost German girl. In all likelihood, Miller took advantage of the confusion over her identity to pass as German and win her freedom. One of the clues is her first encounter with Madame Carl in the cafe in which–

CAROL WILSON: Sally says that she has no knowledge of this whatsoever. She says she’s been a slave all of her life.

PETER ONUF: Miller only adopted the Muller identity after so many immigrants claimed to recognize her. On top of that, her former owner even tracked down the real Salome Muller as a witness in the ongoing legal battle. But in the end, what mattered was not who Sally was, but how people saw her.

CAROL WILSON: After she wins her appeal, her lawyer makes a speech at this party that they have. One of the things that he says is that part of the reason that we know she’s white is because she’s won over so many white people to her cause. That wouldn’t have happened if she was really an African.

Southern whites want desperately to believe that they can tell the difference between white people and black people. And so the fact that white people accept her as a white person, they consider that factual evidence. Well, she must be white, because we think she’s white.

PETER ONUF: Wilson says that tension between who Miller was and who people thought she was is what makes her story more than just a curious case of mistaken identity.

CAROL WILSON: It’s also a window on American struggle to make sense of the complex issue of race. Americans, typically white Americans, have tried to put people into one of two categories– white and black. And yet, since the earliest days of our history, there are people who don’t fit those binary categories.

BRIAN BALOGH: Sally Miller’s story is not unique. Throughout American history, many have tested the limits of those binary racial categories. It’s a strategy known as “racial passing,” and today on the show we’ll unpack its history.

We’ll hear about America’s infatuation with a dreamy Blackfoot Indian in the 1920s, until his true background was uncovered. We’ll explore the story of a black musician who pioneered a genre of exotic music with a bejeweled turban and an invented biography. And we’ll consider the emotional toll of passing.