He passed For Black To Marry Black Woman - The Story Of Clarence King

but the man I want to talk about briefly is Clarence King who was in the fourth of these great surveyors he was a young Newport Rhode Island wasp he came from a very aristocratic family it's 20 Yale PhD at Harvard geologist diminutive friend of John Hayes friend of Henry Adams very well-connected in American society and a very very good geologist and he was put in charge of what was called the 40th parallel survey to survey all the land between Sacramento in the West and Cheyenne in the center of the country a thousand miles and a hundred miles north and south took him seven years to do it impeccable maps one I mean they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars if you want to get the full report of the 40th parallel expedition and as a reward for doing that so well he was made the first ever director of the United States Geological Survey a body which still exists today however he had a peculiar personal life he and I trust no one will be offensive offended it's early in the morning I'm afraid but he sexually very energetic but he didn't like white women he loved Native American women and he loved black women and there came an event when he was well on in years he was walking across through Riverside Park in New York and he saw walking towards him a black woman and for him it was a sort of a coup de foudre he saw this he said this is the woman of my dreams but instead of going up to her and saying good evening madam my name is Terrence King I'm director of the United States Geological Survey will you have dinner with me he's thinking too fast on his feet he made a remark which turned his whole life topsy-turvy he said good evening madam my name is James Todd where he got that name from I don't know I may look white but I'm in fact black and I'm a porter with the Pullman railway company will you have dinner with me this is that guy this is that guy today we begin with a woman who was born a slave around 1860 marthis and Weiss wrote a book about the marriage of that former slave the woman was ADA Copeland and the book is called passing strange in a Copeland as someone we know very very little about we know she was born in West Point Georgia just months before Georgia seceded from the Union we know that she likely spent her childhood in a world of violence and confusion since Georgia exactly during the Civil War and we know that sometime in the mid 1880s she moved north to New York City and somehow she met a man on the streets of New York who introduced himself to her as a Pullman Porter named James Todd he said that he was African American or let her assumed that he was African American all Pullman porters were African American and if he was a Pullman Porter he must be black now help me understand this because we're getting to the heart of the story here this man named James Todd was anything that he had just told his future wife true absolutely not James Todd was really not black he was not a Pullman Porter and he was not even James Todd he was in fact Clarence King a very well-educated white Explorer who was truly a famous man in late 19th century America and connected to a lot of other famous men two of his closest friends were Henry Adams who was the grandson and great-grandson of presidents and John Hay who had been Abraham Lincoln's private secretary and would later become the Secretary of State now I think this story will be surprising to a lot of people starting with the question of how a man who was white seemingly about as white as you could be could possibly pass for a black man that is something that surprises most people when they hear this story but we have to think about what was going on in America in the decades following the Civil War once enslaved people became freed people many southerners became very anxious about how they could keep black people in their place so to speak how could you recognize a black person if they were no longer an enslaved person so throughout the south states passed laws that effectively said this if one of your eight great-grandparents is black you are black no matter what your skin looks like and paradoxically those laws meant to fix race made racial designations extremely fluid and they made it possible for a light complexioned blue-eyed blond-haired man like Clarence King to claim African ancestry when he actually had none at all this is a reminder isn't it this is a period when a fair number of people passed as it was called from one racial designation to another although usually it would have gone the other way a black person passing his white that's correct I mean passing involves the idea of assuming a different identity in order to pass towards greater social or legal privileges so yes many Americans of African American descent passed into the white world but it was extremely rare at this moment or at any moment for a white person to claim African American identity and did he end up living two separate lives then he did in the city of Manhattan he was the wittiest after-dinner speaker at the Century Club he was a leading scientist but he had a secret life and he would move across the Brooklyn Bridge perhaps shedding his Century Club suit for his Pullman porters coat and go home to his wife Ada and eventually they had five children and when he moved into Brooklyn and into her house he became the black man known as James Todd are you sure that his wife didn't know what he was doing I don't believe she really know who he was and let me tell you why for ADA Copeland Todd marriage to a white man would have been very difficult she would have been ostracized by other black people as well as white people whom she knew but marriage to a very light complected african-american would have seemed to her a step up in the world in 1900 we know from a newspaper account she gave a party at her house and this party was covered by the Black Press I simply don't believe that if she thought herself married to a white man she would have allowed that kind of scrutiny of her private life let me add one thing the party was a masquerade everybody had a mascot everybody was uh if her husband was there he was absolutely wearing a mask and you know that's the kind of detail I'm not a novelist I couldn't make that up but this one really happened what this story make you think about the racial and ethnic divisions that seemed to mean so much to people then and and would seem to mean so much to people now although in a somewhat different way I think it's a story that teaches us something about the fluidity of race pinning down just what race is has always been difficult I mean look at this family for example Clarence King and ADA King that she later became known there are two daughters both married as white women they went to City Hall in New York married white men in each swore for the other on the official form that the bride was white but a year or two later their brothers went to register for the draft for World War one and they were both assigned to all-black Jim Crow regiments a few years later they're back home living with their mother and they're all designated as mulatto the designations are always shifting it's interesting to go back and look at how the federal census forms allowed people to designate their own races in 1890 at the height of the Jim Crow laws and a kind of an obsession with defining what black people were the federal government allowed you on your census form to be white black mulatto quadroon or octoroon I'm to ruin meaning 1/8 black 1/8 one great grandparent of African descent ten years later in 1900 that gave you no possibility of being a mixed-race person you were white or you were black later in the early 20th century there's a designation that you can be mulatto that is of mixed race but in 1930 that disappears from 1930 until the year 2000 you can only be black or you can be white or you can be a you know some other descent there is no possibility of a mixed-race designation between 1930 in the year 2000 changed again hasn't it right and now Americans can indeed check that they are of mixed descent which is another thing to learn here that we might think of a lot of these changes in racial consciousness is being recent but just what you said suggests the way that the debate has gone on for well over a century centuries really exactly and I think Clarence King in a way was a racial radical in the 1880s he was writing about a proposed Monument and he said there can be no true American style because there's no true American people and king envisioned an American future and I quote here when the composite elements of American populations are melted down into one race alloy when there are no more Irish or Germans Negroes in English but only Americans belonging to one defined American race so in fact his friends never believed him when he said this but he truly believed that miscegenation or mixed race was the hope of america very few people believed that in the 1880s Mathis and Weiss is the author of passing strange thanks very much my pleasure thank you [Music] you

Channel: Peace-Of-Mind

Views: 1,223,465

Rating: 4.8205175 out of 5

Keywords: Interracial marriage Jim Crow Ada

Id: dTW_m94aOq0

Length: 9min 34sec (574 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2019