Passing Strange

A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line

Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth-century western history, a brilliant geologist and writer who invented a system for mapping the West after the Civil War. Secretary of State John Hay called King “the best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age colleagues and elite Newport family: for thirteen years he lived a double life — as the celebrated scientist Clarence King and as a Black Pullman porter named James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his Black wife, Ada Copeland, only on his deathbed. At a moment when many mixed-race Americans concealed their African heritage to seize the privileges of white America, King falsely presented himself as a Black man to pass the other way across the color line.

Uncovering King’s deception for the first time, Passing Strange tells the intertwined stories of King and his wife Ada, whose own life follows the long arc of the nation’s racial history, from Civil War to Civil Rights.

Finalist: 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography); 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Award (History)

Janet Maslin, New York Times Top Ten Books of 2009

“‘Passing Strange’ tells an astounding true story that would beggar most novelists’ imaginations.” New York Times

“immensely fascinating” Washington Post