Alexander L. Manly could have been the first victim of the bloody race riot that exploded in Wilmington, N.C., in early November 1898. Manly, publisher of the Daily Record, North Carolina’s only African-American newspaper, was the target of the rioters after he wrote an inflammatory editorial about white supremacists’ charges that black men were assaulting white women. Manly fired back that the white women who claimed that black men had raped them had, in fact, engaged in consensual sex. His press was burned to the ground. He narrowly escaped to Philadelphia, but upon arrival, discovered that work was hard for a black man to find. Employers summarily rejected his applications for employment as a painter, insisting that no union would accept a black member.
“So I tried being white,” Manly later explained to the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, “that is, I did not reveal the fact that I had coloured blood, and I immediately got work in some of the best shops in Philadelphia. I joined the union and had no trouble at all.”
But Manly soon tired of the charade. Passing only during the work day—"9-to-5 passing,” it was called—meant that he had to leave his house early in the morning and could not return until after nightfall. He feared discovery. “The thing became unbearable,” he lamented. “I preferred to be a Negro and hold up my head rather than to be a sneak.” So he became a janitor and lived openly with his recognizably black wife and children.
Manly could have reaped all of the benefits that accrued to whiteness: economic opportunity and security, political agency, and countless social privileges. Indeed, by some accounts, his light skin had eased his escape from Wilmington, protected him from the racial violence that had engulfed the city, and very likely saved his life. But for Manly, those gains were far outweighed by all that there was to lose.
Scholars have paid far more attention to what was gained by passing as white than to what was lost by rejecting a black racial identity.
After emancipation, to pass as white was considered by many African-Americans—most famously James Weldon Johnson in the 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man—to be selling their birthright “for a mess of pottage.” It meant no longer belonging as a family member and no longer sharing experiences, stories, and memories of times past. “No decent man could stand it,” Manly explained. And during the early to mid-20th century, many African-Americans who did take the anxious leap from one racial identity to another experienced painful alienation and isolation.
Those are losses for which scholars have not fully accounted.
Historians and literary scholars have paid far more attention to what was gained by passing as white than to what was lost by rejecting a black racial identity: not just entitlements of whiteness, but also transformative psychological rewards. A white identity blunted the shame of low-status wage work and united white men, despite their inferior socioeconomic position, with their betters. Almost all white women, even prostitutes, were by whiteness remade into “ladies,” a class that excluded even the wealthiest and most refined black women.
As the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has explained in a groundbreaking 1992 article in the journal Signs, white ladies were to be protected—economically, physically, and sexually—at all costs. In the Jim Crow South, daily reminders of white women’s heightened status were visible on “white ladies only” signs on public-bathroom doors. Higginbotham notes that the first-class “ladies car” on trains excluded black men and women other than a caregiver accompanying a white child. No white child would be made to endure the indignities and the filth of the second-class “smoking car” to which all blacks, white drunks, and other undesirable passengers were assigned. The legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris argued in a 1993 article in the Harvard Law Review that whiteness is a form of property, a privilege that has unfairly allocated economic, political, social, and institutional resources along the color line.
Viewed through a single type of source, the nature of passing remains occluded and hazy, but taken together, literary and historical materials illuminate the jagged and porous boundary along which racially ambiguous people lived. A history of passing, then, must be found in the private and innermost spaces of African-American lives, in sources that were not organized or assembled around the theme of passing.
In every era, Americans produced new sets of unexpected sources: runaway-slave notices and slave narratives in the antebellum period; the social gossip about the light-skinned wives of black elected officials during Reconstruction; the blurbs on the back of novels, the diary entries, and the letters of acclaimed light-skinned writers during the Harlem Renaissance; census data, newspaper reporting, and correspondence about laws designed to preserve racial integrity in Jim Crow territory; students’ records at colleges and universities; and celebratory mass-market articles in popular magazines about the success of racial integration in the early civil-rights era.
N.Y. Herald Tribune via Yale U.
At first glance, passing appears to be a deeply individualistic practice, but it was often, intentionally or involuntarily, a collaborative phenomenon. Family members, friends, and neighbors may have disdained, felt ambivalent toward, or empathized with those who passed, but they tended to protect them. Mothers had no choice but to turn away from their white-looking children in public. A history of passing cannot be written without telling their stories, too.
The largely unexplored realms of family life also reveal how everyday people made sense of their racial identities. Passing becomes an unintended and unmistakable subject throughout these family histories, which offer firsthand accounts of the interruptions, gaps, and omissions created by a relative’s decision to pass. Departing from narratives that portray passing as only an individualistic and utilitarian practice, or one reserved for only a handful of black elites, family histories bring into focus the collective nature and communal politics of passing.
The work of the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, while not specifically designed to study passing, offers evidence and insight into the social and psychological tolls of passing for those left behind. During the 1930s and 1940s, when Frazier asked his students at Howard University to write family histories, many found that rumors and speculations were all they had to knit together their genealogies.
Throughout the collection of Frazier’s documents at Howard, I could see students struggling to complete the assignment. The only information that one man had about his grandmother was that she was “light enough to pass for white” and had a brother who went west and became wealthy. Another woman knew little about her family history. One of the few relatives close to her explained, “Her brown skin had been responsible for her separation from the rest of the family who were blonde.” Such omissions and doubts led to profound feelings of disconnection and incompleteness. Trying to make sense of an absent father who “looked like white,” a woman wrote, “The strangest thing was, no one ever told me about my father’s people or from whence he came. I have not been able to find out any information concerning him, only that I resemble him in every respect.”
In the Burton Historical Collection, in Detroit, I found a letter from a relative of Elsie Roxborough, a woman who passed as white in the 1930s and 40s before committing suicide in 1947. The family member lamented, “So one does the best they can do. You are aware that you have missed something of what life has to give. It’s a sadness that never lets go.”
A history of passing, however, is not just the history of loss. It also offers multiple ways of looking at the color line and reveals the illogic of racial categorizations, which African-Americans have long realized. In an 1889 essay, “What Is a White Man?,” Charles W. Chesnutt, the racially ambiguous novelist, poked fun at the jumble of state laws that allowed a person to change racial identification by walking across a state line.
Walter Francis White, who would become executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, used his blond hair and blue eyes in the 1920s to investigate lynching in the South. White must have laughed nervously when he sat next to a white man on a train who bragged that he had special expertise in identifying a “yaller nigger.” Taking White’s hand into his and pointing to the cuticles, the white man explained that if White “had nigger blood, it would show here on [his] half-moons,” an antiquated belief about a telltale sign of black racial identity. The American racial regime has been rife with such incongruities and folly, with obvious paradoxes and puzzling contradictions.
By the end of the 20th century, the racial landscape had changed, and new choices and possibilities had emerged. American society began to recognize mixed-race identities. The change was reflected not only in personal attitudes and experiences but also in federal racial classifications. In 1997, the Census Bureau’s policy changed for the first time in almost 80 years to allow individuals to “mark one or more” categories. Numerous mixed-race organizations, magazines, college classes, and websites appeared and gained public attention.
But for those living before our own multiracial moment, such categories were unavailable. The stubbornness and the resiliency of the white-black racial divide in the United States—the persistence of the “one-drop rule”; the lack of official categories for multiracial people; the illegality of interracial marriage until the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967; and the history of the United States as a white-majority/black-minority nation until increased immigration led to major demographic changes in the mid-20th century—created conditions ripe for racial passing. Those political, economic, and social circumstances fixed the color line so that once people passed, they rarely saw an available avenue for return.
Alexander Manly was an exception. For him, the benefits of whiteness could not soothe the ache of loss.
Allyson Hobbs is an assistant professor of history at Stanford University. She is the author of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard University Press, 2014).
