{"id":41561,"date":"2015-06-29T20:33:36","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T20:33:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41561"},"modified":"2015-06-29T20:37:31","modified_gmt":"2015-06-29T20:37:31","slug":"driven-by-love-or-ambition-slipping-across-the-color-line-through-the-ages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41561","title":{"rendered":"Driven by Love or Ambition, Slipping Across the Color Line Through the Ages"},"content":{"rendered":"

Driven by Love or Ambition, Slipping Across the Color Line Through the Ages<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2015-06-28<\/p>\n

Rachel L. Swarns<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
\nClarence King<\/a>, 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 and five children in Brooklyn<\/a>.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The railroad carried him to the hot springs<\/a> of Arkansas<\/a>, the copper mines of Montana<\/a> and the gold fields of the Pacific Northwest<\/a>. Weary, lonesome and ailing, he sent letters of love and longing to his wife in New York City<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can see your dear face every night when I lay my head on the pillow,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI think of you and dream of you, and my first waking thought is of your dear face and your loving heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ada Todd saved those letters, symbols of devotion from her husband, James Todd, a fair-skinned black man from Baltimore<\/a> who worked as a Pullman porter<\/a> in the late 1800s, and spent weeks and sometimes months away from home.<\/p>\n

His earnings allowed the family to move from a cramped, predominantly African-American section of Vinegar Hill in Brooklyn<\/a> to a more residential street in Bedford-Stuyvesant<\/a>, to a spacious 11-room house in Flushing, Queens<\/a>. It was only when he was dying in 1901 that Ms. Todd finally began to piece together the truth: Her husband was not from Baltimore. He was not a Pullman porter. And he was not a black man…<\/p>\n

…Yet 19th-century history is dotted with such cases. White men and women driven by love, ambition or other circumstances sometimes leapt across the racial chasm, defying state laws and social conventions designed to keep blacks and whites apart.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll never know how many people did it,\u201d said Martha A. Sandweiss<\/a>, a historian at Princeton University who documented Mr. King\u2019s double life for the first time in her book \u201cPassing Strange<\/a>,\u201d which was published in 2009.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they did it well,\u201d she said, \u201cthey\u2019re invisible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clarence King did it well…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,6462,20],"tags":[20324,3563,20323,3562,2640,20257,20241,2880,9343,2327],"class_list":["post-41561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-ada-todd","tag-clarence-king","tag-clarence-rivers-king","tag-martha-a-sandweiss","tag-new-york-times","tag-rachel-a-dolezal","tag-rachel-dolezal","tag-rachel-l-swarns","tag-rachel-swarns","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}