Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

"I admire this book a great deal. It uses a fascinating story to illuminate the entire society. The central character is a white man named Clarence King who was born to wealth and privilege. He was one of the famous figures of the Gilded Age, an explorer, a scientist, and a bestselling author. He knew everybody from the top of society to the bottom. King was known among his friends as a bachelor who had romantic liaisons with a wide range of women. What almost no one knows is that King married Ada Copeland, a Black woman who was born into slavery in Georgia. Ada believed Clarence to be an African American Pullman porter named James Todd, whose frequent absences were explained by his railroad work. So King, a patrician white public figure, privately passed as Black and had five mixed race children. The book revolves around their incredibly complicated life together. The story is fascinating, the characters are fascinating, and it’s just a wonderful piece of work. We think race was an impermeable boundary in the age of Jim Crow. The Gilded Age becomes the age of the ‘one drop rule.’ Marni Sandweiss uses this story to show us that there was mixing, and that people passed color lines for all sorts of reasons. In Gilded Age society, elites enjoyed the social possibilities of poorer urban areas. Passing Strange makes clear that racism is real but that racial categories are artificial and often outwitted throughout history, including during the Gilded Age."