Clarence King/Ada Copeland King
By
John C Abercrombie
Race is a tricky thing to define because the classifications do not work. If we use physical or social qualities, we are often wrong. Take the case of Homer Plessey who was arrested for riding in a streetcar in New Orleans. Of his great grandparents, one was Black and seven were White. did not look Black, but the law differed from state to state and in Louisiana that was enough to qualify him as Black. He had passed the scrutiny of the conductor and had taken a seat in the White car. His arrest was arranged and intended to show the absurdity of using appearance to define race.
In fact, the term was first used to describe people who spoke a common language. Race did not matter. If you were from France and spoke French, you were French. Such factors as the color of your hair, eyes or skin did not enter the equation. While today race is based on social construct and based on the rules made by a society, while it does not have any inherent physical or biological meaning.
The concept of race is foundational to racism and the belief that humans can b divided based on the superiority of one race over another is not scientifically based.
Today scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete and discourage racial, explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits.
Some have gone as far as to define race by the one drop rule, and that a person is Black if they have one drop of Black blood. Considering that the average person has 94,0, 00 drops of blood, this means that every person on earth is Black, but this fact is not observable in most people. Such as Homer Plessey and Walter White to name a couple. Take a look at the case of the Crumplers*, or the case of William Ellis.
To see these cases, click these links
Social concepts of groups and races has varied over time but taxonomies (the branch of science concerned with classification, especially of organisms; systematics) discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits
Scientists continue to use the concept of race to make fuzzy distinction of observable differences in behavior while others see the idea of race as an over generalization and one group continues to argue that all humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Since the second half of the 20th century, the association of race with the discredited theories of scientific racism has contributed to race becoming increasingly seen as a pseudoscientific system of classification.
There are many cases where people have passed to take advantage of the White privilege and the rewards that go with something so frail as skin color, hair color and texture and eye color. This post focuses on the case of a White person passing as Black in order to marry the woman he loves. He lived a double life with one White identity and a Black identity. This shows the ambiguity of using these factors to determine race.
Ada Copeland King was the wife of the famed American geologist Clarence King. Ada Copeland was born a slave in December 1860. As a young woman she moved to New York in the mid-1880s and worked as a nursemaid. A nursemaid is a young woman hired to watch over a child or small children.
Around 18s87 she became involved with Clarence King, an upper-class White man who presented himself as a light-skinned Black Pullman porter with the name of James Todd. As unusual as this may sound, considering the long history of slavery in the United States, many Blacks had European ancestry. Many took advantage of the opportunity to pass for White and enjoy the privileges reserved for Whites. No one was the wiser. However, this set up a situation where many Whites who do not know their ancestry are finding that they have African heritage.
King was attracted to Black and Native American women and wore the coat of a pullman porter and explained that he was West Indian and was frequently away but was able to support a family. How was he able to pull this off?
Pullman porters were a cherished job for Blacks as it paid well. George Pullman sought out former slaves to work his sleeping berths and serve passengers. They served on the railroads from the late 1860s until the Pullman Company ceased operation December 31, 1968. Some sleeping car porters continued working on cars that were operated by the railroads themselves. In 1971, Amtrak superseded the term calling them instead “sleeping car attendant” the former term had been considered derogatory.
Until the 1960s Pullman porters were exclusively Black but contributed to the development of the Black middle class in America.
With A Philip Randolph, the Pullman porters formed the first all-Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. This was a significant step in the advancement of the Civil Rights Movement
Pullman also employed Black maids on deluxe trains to care for women’s needs, especially women with children. In 1926 Pullman employed two hundred maids and over 10,000 porters.
They were married in a home ceremony in September 1888, and he lived as Todd with her but like Clark Kent and Superman, he was Clarence King while working in the field and they had five children with four surviving to adulthood.
To show the fragility of race, their two daughters married White men and their two sons served in the military classified as Back. In 1901, King contracted tuberculosis and he wrote Ada from Arizona confessing is true identity. King was well connected, and you should watch the videos in order to understand how well. He told her he had left money in a trust fund for with his friend John Gardiner.
After King died, Copeland started a thirty-year battle to gain control of the trust fund. Representing them were the notable lawyers Everett J Waring, the first Black lawyer to argue a case before the Unite States Supreme Court and J Douglas Wetmore who gained fame fighting the segregation laws in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1933 the court determined that King had died penniless, and no money was forthcoming. John Hay, a friend of king’s provided with a monthly stipend until his death in 1905. After Hay’s death his daughter Helen Hay Whitney continued the support. When the stipend eventually stopped Copeland-King continued to live in the house John Hay had bought her, an eleven-room house in Flushing, Queens.
Clarence Rivers King was born January 6, 1842, and is best known for being an American geologist mountaineer and author. King was the first director of the United States Geological Survey and served from 1879 to 1881. He had been nominated by President Rutherford B Hayes; King is noted for is exploration of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range.
Clarence developed an early interest in outdoor exploration and natural and was encouraged by his mother. At the age of thirteen he was accepted into the prestigious Hartford High School in Boston and New Haven. He is described as a good student and versatile athlete. His mother married George S Howland who financed his education in the Sheffield Scientific School affiliated with Yale College in 1860.
One of his teachers James Dwight Dana a highly regarded geologist had participated in scientific expeditions to the South Atlantic, South Pacific and the West coasts of South and North America and sparked Kings interests.
Hearing about the ascent of Mount Shasta by William Henry Brewer which was believed to be at the time the tallest mountain in the United States. We now know that honor belong to Mt Rainier in Washington state in the lower forty-eight and later Denali, formerly known as Mount McKinley in Alaska. He wrote his professor and indicated that this was his ambition if he could get work in that field.
In 1863, King and friend Gardiner and acquaintance William Hyde traveled by railroad to Missouri and joined a wagon train to Carson City, Nevada where King and Gardiner continued to California. In California King joined the California Geological Survey without pay and collaborated with several famed explorers. In 1864 King and coworkers made the first ascent of a peak in the Eastern Sierra that King named Mount Tyndall in honor of one of his heroes. They discovered several higher peaks including the one we now know as Mount Whitney.
When President Abraham Lincoln designated the Yosemite Valley a permanent public reserve, King, and Gardiner re appointed to make a boundary survey around the rim of Yosemite Valley.
King and Gardiner then secured a survey of the Mojave Desert and Arizona under the auspices of the United States Army. King was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1871.
King received funding and was named United States Geologist of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel Survey in 1867.
King and his team explored the area of Eastern California to Wyoming. He published his famous Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada in 1872. He also heard about a secret Diamond deposit and exposed the hoax in 1872 and was regaled as a hero for exposing it. He narrated the geological history of the West, which was well received and called “one of the great scientific works of the late nineteenth century.”
In 1879 the United States Congress consolidated the number of geological surveys and created the United States Geological Survey with King as the first director.
Ada Copeland King and Clarence had a thirteen-year relationship and had five children. When the famed geologist was with Ada, he posed as a Black man named James Todd and that is the subject of the book “Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color, written by Martha Sandweiss.
After King died, Copeland embarked on a thirty-year battle to gain control of the trust fund he had promised her. Her representatives included the notable lawyers Everett J. Waring, the first black lawyer to argue a case before the Supreme Court of the United States, and J. Douglas Wetmore, who contested segregation laws in Jacksonville, Florida. Eventually, in 1933, the court determined that King had died penniless, and no money was forthcoming. John Hay, a friend of King’s, provided Ada King with a monthly stipend and, after his death in 1905, Hay’s daughter Helen Hay Whitney continued the support.[2] The stipend eventually stopped, though Copeland until her death continued to live in the house John Hay had bought for her, an 11-room house in Flushing, Queens.
Ada Copeland King died on 14 April 1964, one of the last of the former American slaves.
While we provide an excellent summary, there is so much more in the videos that follow and for those interested in exploring more, books for that.
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Schomburg – The man who built a library
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Clarence King/James Todd
He passed For Black To Marry Black Woman – The Story Of Clarence King
During America’s Gilded Age, Clarence King was a famous geologist, friend of wealthy, famous, and powerful men. He was a larger-than-life character whose intellect and wanderlust pushed him to survey far-flung regions of the western U.S. and South America and develop an abiding appreciation of non-Western culture and people. What his family and wealthy friends did not know was that for 17 years, King lived secretly as James Todd, a black Pullman porter with a black wife and mixed-race children residing in Brooklyn. Devoted to his mother and half-siblings, restless and constantly in need of money, King relied on the largesse of his wealthy friends to help him support both families, never revealing his secret until he was near death. Martha A.Sandweiss relies on letters, newspaper accounts, and interviews to chronicle the extraordinary story of an influential blue-eyed white man who passed for black at a time when passing generally went the other way. An engaging portrait of a man who defied social conventions but could not face up to the potential ruin of an interracial marriage.
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Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line Audible Logo Audible
The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West, and the woman he loved
Clarence King was a late nineteenth-century celebrity, a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as “the best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life-the first as the prominent white geologist and writer Clarence King, and a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common-law wife, Ada Copeland, only on his deathbed. In Passing Strange, noted historian Martha A. Sandweiss tells the dramatic, distinctively American tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race- a story that spans the long century from Civil War to civil rights.
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The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West, and the woman he loved
Clarence King was a late nineteenth-century celebrity, a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as “the best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life-the first as the prominent white geologist and writer Clarence King, and a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common-law wife, Ada Copeland, only on his deathbed. In Passing Strange, noted historian Martha A. Sandweiss tells the dramatic, distinctively American tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race- a story that spans the long century from Civil War to civil rights.
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Ada Copeland Todd / King?
Ada Copeland (ca. 23 December 1860 – 14 April 1964) was the common-law wife of the American geologist Clarence King, who was appointed as the first director of the United States Geological Survey.
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As we look at the couple we speak about the freedom of choice. In this case it was not a choice of two people to marry, but the real world of having to pass the scrutiny of the rest of the world. We see people who have different core values on subjects like religion and others and it is often judged ok, but when it involves people that are perceived as being of different races, the world goes bug nuts crazy. There should become a time when individuals get to choose on their own and everyone else minds their own business.