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

The secret double life of the man who mapped theAmerican West, and the woman he loved

Clarence King was a late nineteenth-centurycelebrity, a brilliant scientist and explorer once described bySecretary of State John Hay as "the best and brightest of hisgeneration." But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts andprominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a doublelife-the first as the prominent white geologist and writer ClarenceKing, and a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworkernamed James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China traderpassed across the color line, revealing his secret to his blackcommon-law wife, Ada Copeland, only on his deathbed. In PassingStrange, noted historian Martha A. Sandweiss tells thedramatic, distinctively American tale of a family built along thefault lines of celebrity, class, and race- a story that spans thelong century from Civil War to civil rights.