“Code-Switching”

Untold numbers of Americans labeled as black have passed into white society to gain opportunities and even freedom. We’re going to take a moment now to consider the story of a famous New Yorker who passed in the opposite direction– white to black. His name was Clarence King.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: Clarence King was truly a celebrity in 19th century America. If “People” magazine had existed, he might have been on the cover.

ED AYERS: This is Historian Martha Sandweiss who wrote a book about King. She says that he hailed from an upper crust Rhode Island family. King studied at Yale and made a name for himself as a mountaineer and pioneering geologist who mapped the mineral resources of the American West. In 1879, Clarence King became the first director of the United States Geological Survey. He had lots of famous friends and even dined at the White House.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: But he had a secret no one knew about. He lived in the public world as the famous “white man” Clarence King. 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.

ED AYERS: Now, just to be clear, King was–

MARTHA SANDWEISS: –as white as they come. He had sandy, blondish brown hair. He had blue eyes.

ED AYERS: Yet he somehow lived this double life. Details about his masquerade are hard to find. He was careful not to get caught by his white or black social circles, so he didn’t leave a lot of records behind.

Here’s what we do know. King’s wife, Ada Copeland, was born into slavery in rural Georgia. She moved to New York City in the 1880s, where she found work as a nurse maid. Sometime in 1887 or 1888, Clarence King began to court her.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: He has to have his lie all ready. It must’ve just comes spilling out of his mouth the moment he started speaking to her. And he tells her that his name is James Todd and that he’s a Pullman porter.

ED AYERS: Pullman was a luxury rail car company.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: Now, all Pullman porters were black. You could not be a Pullman porter unless you were black. So as he invents this fake identity for himself, he smartly chooses a profession that reaffirms his false racial identity.

ED AYERS: Now King, as a white man, could’ve married Ada. Interracial marriage was legal in New York, unlike other states at the time. But instead, they were wedded as a black couple. From that point on, the famous geologist passed back and forth between his white and black worlds on a daily basis.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: It’s not like he has one comfortable life where he can really be himself. He has to lie and conceal things in his white life, and he has to lie and conceal things in his black life.

ED AYERS: But how, exactly, did King pull this off?

PETER ONUF: The social geography of New York City played a big role. Public spaces were integrated, but communities were not. So James Todd could be confident that his African American neighbors in Brooklyn were unlikely to cross paths with Clarence King in Manhattan. Then there’s King and Todd’s contrasting lifestyles. King, a New York City bachelor, belonged to a number of private men’s clubs.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: And these are the places that he took his meals. This is where he received his mail. And this is where he visited with friends. So nobody really had to go into his private home, or really know where it was.

He’s also living in New York at a moment when residential hotels are very popular for upper middle class people. It allowed you to live comfortably without the burden of employing your own servants. That meant if he was away from the hotel, nobody really noticed. That allows King to kind of slip away, and slip away he did.

PETER ONUF: James Todd could explain his frequent absences to his wife by saying he was at work.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: What do Pullman porters do? They travel all the time. And his absence from Ada’s home would simply reiterate the idea that he, in fact, was on a train. When, in fact, he’s just in midtown Manhattan being Clarence King.

PETER ONUF: King kept up these secret lives for 13 years, until his death in 1901. There’s no indication that Ada ever discovered her husband’s secret. But Sandweiss says there are indications that the stress of a double identity occasionally caught up with King. He was often depressed. And then, there’s a curious incident in the early 1890s that even made the papers.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: He’s at the Central Park Zoo. And the way the newspapers tell it, he got into an altercation with a black butler and became intemperate, and was taken off and was put in a mental hospital for some weeks.

Now what happened there, I really don’t know. But I think it’s possible that a black man who saw Clarence King and knew him as James Todd began speaking to him and King just lost it. These two carefully separated worlds had just collided and he really didn’t know how to respond. And it was just as easy to go off to the Bloomingdale asylum, the mental hospital, for a few weeks, as to explain what had really happened.

PETER ONUF: When King died, he revealed his true name to Ada in a letter, but not his actual race. We don’t know how Ada Todd, who later called herself Ada King, reacted to this news. Two of their sons later served as African American soldiers in World War I. Clarence and Ada’s two light-skinned daughters passed into white society by marrying white men.

ED AYERS: But one question remains. Sandweiss says that Clarence King was as white as they come. Blonde-haired and blue-eyed, he had no known African American ancestry. So how did he pass as black?

MARTHA SANDWEISS: I think to understand how someone who looked like Clarence King could persuade anybody that he was of African descent, we have to look to the racial laws of the post reconstruction era. It’s the moment when southern state legislatures, eager to keep freed men in their place, want to make blackness a near permanent state of being.

ED AYERS: Many southern states passed laws that established the “One-Drop Rule.” This law stated that if you had a single ancestor who was black, you too were black.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: What these laws do is this, they separate what you would look like from your official racial designation. But these laws create an unintentional opportunity for a white man like Clarence King to claim African ancestry when he had none at all. So it’s ironic, but by making race dependent on something other than visible appearances, the Jim Crow laws demonstrated that race was such an unsteady category and allowed King to engage in what I would probably call reverse passing.

ED AYERS: In the late century, many white people worried about black Americans passing as white. But no one seemed to notice when a white man crossed the color line.

PETER ONUF: Martha Sandweiss helped us tell that story. She’s a historian at Princeton University and the author of “Passing Strange– A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line.”

BRIAN BALOGH: Earlier we heard from Carol Wilson, a historian at Washington College and author of “The Two Lives of Sally Miller– A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans.”