American Lives: The ‘Strange’ Tale Of Clarence King |
American Lives: The ‘Strange’ Tale Of Clarence King
National Public Radio
2010-08-18
Steve Inskeep, Host
Morning Edition
U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library
Ada Copeland, an African-American woman born in Georgia just months before that state seceded from the Union, moved to New York City in the mid-1880s. There, she met a man named James Todd. He was light-skinned, handsome, had a good job for an African-American man in that time — a Pullman porter.
They hit it off, and eventually married. They had five children and a house in Brooklyn. Their story would be unremarkable if not for one detail: Nothing James had told his future wife was true.
“James Todd was really not black, he was not a Pullman porter, and he was not even James Todd,” author Martha Sandweiss tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “He was in fact Clarence King, a very well-educated white explorer who was truly a famous man in late 19th century America.”…
…Sandweiss’ book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, examines why King chose to live a double life — and how his experience reflects and represents how Americans, both past and present, have thought about race. In the aftermath of the Civil War, particularly, the U.S. had to recast some of the ways it thought about questions of race and identity…
Read and/or listen to the story here.
Tags: Clarence King, Martha A. Sandweiss, Martha Sandweiss, National Public Radio, Steve Inskeep