The one-drop rule! Meaning anyone with any known black ancestry, no matter how far back it was acquired, classified you as a black person. No amount of white ancestry counted! Ninety-nine and a half just wouldn't do! It had to be no less than one hundred percent! That "one drop" (or traceable amount) automatically assigned racially mixed individuals in the late nineteenth, and early twentieth century an Afro-American race card. The one-drop rule was a concept created in the U.S. South to codify and strengthen segregation and disfranchisement most notably among those of black African descent. Post-Reconstruction white legislatures enacted Jim Crow laws of segregation and restriction in myriad areas from accomodation & employment to interracial relationships. No doubt, some of these same Supreme Court decisions were passed by former slave-owners and overseers who helped create the many mixed and multi-racial people that they now sought to further subjugate.
Consider the case of Anita Hemmings. I have not found any evidence that Miss Hemmings was descended from the families produced from the infamous union of Thomas Jefferson and his "near white" slave girl, Sally Hemmings, but it would not be a surprise if she was. Many of them were light-skinned enough to blend into white society without notice and many of them did. On the other hand, many of them proudly professed that they were people of color. Race couldn't be denied for Anita Hemmings's Boston parents who were both bi-racial and identified as "black" but sent their daughter off to Vassar College as a white girl in 1897. She quickly established herself as an exceptional student, mastering Latin, ancient Greek and French. But her roommate wasn't buying the charade! She voiced her suspicions to her prominent father who immediately hired a private investigation into the background of Miss Hemmings's Boston upbringing. It was only a few weeks before graduation, but she was not destroyed! She was allowed to graduate! After graduation Hemmings married one Dr. Andrew Love, who eventually built a prosperous Madison Avenue medical practice. Dr. Love was also "passing" for white, and together they raised three very successful children and raised them into white adulthood. The point? The phenomenon of passing was a direct result of the so-called "one drop rule". For large numbers of fair-skinned African Americans at the turn of the century, passing was a means of gaining opportunities that never would have otherwise been optional to them as blacks. Even for families of color who had risen to a level of educational, economic, and professional aspiration, they were still excluded from most of the elite institutions. Their dreams of a better life were most often deferred. Those who chose to cross the "color line" paid a heavy price! In order to fully gain the opportunities they sought, they had to give up all familial and social ties to their community of origin. They denied parents, siblings and forgot themselves as they moved forward often never looking backward.
Writer James Baldwin once called her a "dog-assed" actress! And if her acting abilities were questionable to some, it could never be denied that Merle Oberon was one of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood during the 1930's and 40's! Few knew that the British actress now appearing in American films was born in Bombay, India to a woman of color named Charlotte Selby (below right) and a British engineer working on the Indian Railways. Or maybe that woman of color was actually her grandmother and not her mother after all! Perhaps that woman of color passed as Merle's mother to raise her for her own daughter Constance! Merle's actual parentage has remained deliberately cloudy, and during her reign as one of Hollywood's true beauty queens, 
she worked hard at obscuring it. Throughout her professional career, she maintained that she had been born and raised in St. Helens, a beachside resort on the east coast of Australia. And since there was no proof, she declared all pertinent records had been burned in a fire! Oberon would also work hard at her craft, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her role in The Dark Angel (1937), and one of her most famous film roles is Cathy in 1939's Wuthering Heights. As she climbed the ladder of success, her mother (above left) caught up with her in Hollywood, moved in and joined the masquerade by passing herself off as her daughter's live-in maid. By 1950, Oberon's career was all but over, but she remained a well-respected personality in her community. Since her death in 1979, there have been a number of books, a documentary and a television mini-series, all of which have examined her convoluted background. Although black-to-white passing is considered the most classic type of racial passing, Merle Oberon's case proves it was certainly not the only form.
Fredi Washington could have passed as white if she wanted to, and in 1930's Hollywood, she was often urged to do just that! In her private life, she was a fierce "race" woman, but on-screen she was the ultimate "tragic mulatto" ~ usually a female of mixed-race, torn between two worlds and never able to be comfortable in either. She was miserable and in turn, made everyone else's life miserable too! She was often portrayed as despising her heritage, especially that aspect of it that made her "black" and in her decision to pass, tragedy was her destiny and death was often her reward for turning her back on "her people". Miss Washington was born in Georgia into a multi-racial family in 1903, traveled to New York City as a young woman and quickly established herself as a beauty with a personality to be reckoned with. She started her career as a dancer in some of the most well-known Harlem chorus-lines of the early 1920's, including the legendary Shuffle Along! She was wooed by some of the most wealthy white "stage door johnnies" of the time, but preferred to have affairs with the likes of Paul Robeson, and other dark-skinned men in her profession and in her own community. White-hot and soulful, it was inevitable that Fredi Washington would appear before the film camera. She starred in a number of film shorts made for black audiences, and actually co-starred with Robeson in The Emperor Jones (1933) where she had to darken her ivory skin with a gross makeup so it wouldn't appear Robeson was being lovey-dovey with a white woman. Fredi is most well-known for her groundbreaking performance as Peola, the black girl who passes as white, in the original 1934 movie, Imitation Of Life (not to be confused with the more famous 1959 remake with Lana Turner). Peola is sullen, disrespectful and hates her mother and herself, and Washington played her to absolute perfection. She should have been nominated for an Oscar, but it was Hollywood, circa 1934. She would have a few more Hollywood film roles but by 1940 it was all over! What do you do with a black actress in the 1930's who looked like she did? Maybe disappointed, but certainly not deterred, Fredi Washington went on to make a name for herself on the stage, work as a theater writer, and otherwise live a life that Peola could never imagine for herself as a black woman. She was a founding member of the Negro Actors Guild of America which worked for better opportunities and roles for black actors. Washington was an early mentor to Lena Horne as she began her Hollywood career in the 1940's, and in the 50's, she was influential in helping to cast Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones. Throughout her life, she worked tirelessly with the NAACP and other civil-rights organizations, but despite her efforts in the community, the spectre of Peola always unfairly haunted Washington! She died in 1994 at the age of 92.
I guess it could be said that Elsie Roxborough chose to be tragic! She seemingly had everything going for her! It looked as though she was quite comfortable playing the role of a Black American Princess born into a prominent African American Detroit family. She was the daughter of Charles A. Roxborough, Michigan's first black state senator, and the niece of John Roxborough (who made a fortune as Detroit's no. 1 numbers king). During the depression of the 1930's, the Roxborough's lived in a 
large house with live-in maids, and summered at black resort communities like Idlewild in northern Michigan. Tall, slightly tanned, and talented, the beautiful, young Elsie was regularly mentioned in the society pages of African American newspapers that monitored her love life and followed her every move. She imagined for herself a career as a writer and playwrite that by all indications got off to a promising start. She founded her own black theater company and struck up a close friendship with writer/poet Langston Hughes. Perhaps she wrote too much about what she knew - the black uppercrust, which caused her work to be routinely panned by African American critics as "unrealistic". Roxborough desired legitimate work in the theatre that just wasn't forthcoming, and in 1937, she dyed her hair a shade of auburn and passed into the larger society. By Christmas of that same year, the Baltimore Afro-American reported that Elsie had been living as "Nordic" much to her family's "undisguised disgust". She had traveled to South America, brushed up on her Spanish and became Pat Rico, a white Greenwich Village model. Perhaps a little too dark for certain tastes, she changed her name again and became Mona Manet while operating a modeling studio in Manhattan. Those who remember Elsie Roxborough remember a self-confident, ambitious and happy young woman firmly entrenched in her community and family of origin! Those who remember Mona Manet remember a beautiful but sad social butterfly on the verge of living a lush life in some small dive. There is stong evidence that Elsie Roxborough never completely cut off ties with her family, as some of them were also light enough to pass as well. It was those fair-skinned family members who were called when Mona's roommate found her dead in the apartment they shared in 1949. People like to say that Elsie/Mona committed suicide at the age of 35. Her death certificate states she died of "congestion of the viscera". There were no obits in the New York papers under any of her aliases, but when the African-American papers got wind of her passing, it was banner headlines; they said she died of "nerves". The passing of Elsie Roxborough, both literally and figuratively, elicits many different responses in African Americans. Some offer compassion and try to understand that black America expected much of her, that she may have expected more of herself, and as Elsie she couldn't deliver (or didn't try) but as Mona she still failed! And some others say..well, she had it coming!
Belle da Costa Greene was born Belle Marian Greener in Washington D.C., in 1879 into another elite family of color. Her mother's family had been free, prosperous and light-skinned for decades during slavery. Her father, Richard T. Greener (below) was born bi-racial and a slave, but pulled himself up so high as to become the first black graduate of Havard (class of 1870). He worked tirelessly and diligently toward the "uplift" of the race, and went on to become an attorney, a U.S. Diplomat, and served as the dean of the Howard Law School. Maybe his wife wasn't quite so proud or quite so connected. Maybe Greener was a bit too unattentive to his wife and family (that his marriage eventually resulted in divorce). And while it can't be denied that he passed to them ambition, he failed miserably in instilling any race pride in his children, for after the divorce, they all changed their names (including his ex-wife) and passed for white and never looked back! But Belle was exceptional! 
At Princeton University, she began her undergrad studies in rare books and manuscripts. There, she would meet the nephew of the multi-millionare J.P. Morgan, and he would arrange an interview with his uncle that would literally change the lives of both individuals. Now known as Miss Greene, and claiming a more acceptable Portugese ancestry to explain her darker coloring, Belle "da Costa" Greene stepped into a world unimaginable had Morgan known of her ancestry. Race aside, Greene's ascension to the heights in her field was exceptional for a woman of any race in the early twentieth century. She became Morgan's very close confidant who helped to shape his world-renowned collection of rare books and art at the Pierpont Morgan Library in Manhattan, eventually becoming the director there for twenty-five years. By association, she entered a whirlwind world of fine dining at some of the most prestigious tables in America, trips abroad for both work and pleasure, and scores of romances with rich and powerful men. Greene was known as something of a firecracker with an acerbic wit. She was at home in bohemian Greenwich Village as well as among the upper crust. There was always talk about her coloring and whispers about her background but apparently nobody took it seriously, least of all J.P. Morgan. Belle da Costa Greene was unapologetically unconventional, free-spirited and sassy. She didn't care who said what about her coloring...or maybe she did since she often joked about it in very unflattering and hateful racial terms. She too, fought to keep her background hidden but she also fought for and won respect as an individual and as a woman. A white woman! She died in New York in 1950.
I'd like to say this post is not about re-claiming people who didn't want to be claimed! What would be the point? They were the ones who passed and wanted to be something and someone else! I will admit to being fascinated with the whole idea of living double, or presenting ourselves as something or someone we're really not. But if it weren't about re-claiming, I wouldn't have the fascination! I'm not necessarily mad at them for their decisions and I tried to present them without judgement. I personally don't see this whole early phenomenon of racial "passing" as some kind of imbred racial hatred on the part of the person who passed. Not totally! I don't particularly feel betrayed, but maybe that's a feeling in retrospect as compared to being a contemporary of the person with the fancy for passing. Still, I think it was a very sad predicament to fine oneself in. The threat of being found out, of possibly being ruined both socially, professionally and financially, and of having to give up everything remains intriguing for me. Perhaps, my attraction is really a mediation on what could have been if I had been born in a different generation as a gay man. With talk a'plenty about men who are basically homosexual at heart, but who live on the "down-low" as heterosexuals is proof that there are still a few vestiges of passing prevalent in our culture today, but that is really not a new thing. As those who formerly passed the color line stepped in line with their oppressors & became loud and fervent bigots so as not to draw any suspicion and blow their cover, so it is today! It's now just talked about like racial passing used to be. Today, while some people of mixed-race certainly still have identity issues, they are more prone to embrace all of who they are without the exclusion of one element over another. And so they should! While this continues to make many among us angry, with racial passing no longer relevant or certainly not as prevalent, they now have the choice (like all of us) with not having to settle with making fancy passes, being a passing fancy or just having to pass strange!
White women passing as white men, black women passing as white men, black men passing as white men and white men passing as black men! It remains utterly fascinating! Look for And Now The Men! Part two of Passing Fancies, Fancy Passes and Passing Strange!
