Tag: Clarence King

  • On this episode of BackStory, the Guys will consider how and why Americans throughout the centuries have crossed the lines of racial identity, and find out what the history of passing has to say about race, identity, and privilege in America.

  • Faking Black identity: An American tradition The New Pittsburgh Courier Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 2015-06-27 Robert Fikes Jr., Reference Librarian San Diego State University, San Diego, California The recent case of Rachel Dolezal, the White woman who reinvented herself as African American and headed the Spokane, Washington NAACP, is just the latest sensationalized instance of “passing.”  Though…

  • Driven by Love or Ambition, Slipping Across the Color Line Through the Ages The New York Times 2015-06-28 Rachel L. Swarns Clarence King, a Yale-educated white man who worked as a geologist in the 1800s and dined at the White House, lived a secret life as James Todd, a black train porter with a wife…

  • Love in black and white Princeton Alumni Weekly 2009-04-22 Lawrence Otis Graham ’83 Martha Sandweiss examines racial passing in America Clarence King, a celebrated explorer, geologist, and surveyor in 19th-century America, chose to set that identity aside — and live as a working-class black man during a time of harsh racial segregation in the United…

  • Sandweiss unearths a compelling tale of secret racial identity News at Princeton Princeton University 2009-12-17 Jennifer Greenstein Altmann For three decades, history professor Martha Sandweiss had wondered about a little-noticed detail in the life of Clarence King, a well-known figure in the history of the American West. King, a 19th-century geologist and author, was a…

  • 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.…