Dr. Albert Johnston grew up in Chicago, attended the University of Chicago Medical School in the 1920s, and went on to become a radiologist in a small town in New Hampshire. He and his wife were black a fact they initially hid so that Johnston could secure an internship and for 20 years, they kept this secret from their neighbors, and even their children.
After the United States entered World War II, Johnston effectively "outed" himself by applying for the Navy. He was rejected because of his racial background, and word of his mixed-race roots spread. What motivated Johnston to sacrifice his social status and job security? Was it wartime patriotism, or something else: a desire to have the truth out in the open?
Questions like these have motivated the latest research project of Stanford history Professor Allyson Hobbs. The Johnstons' story is one of the many instances of racial "passing" the practice in which light-skinned African Americans chose to present themselves as white that Hobbs profiles in her upcoming book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Passing is a subject that historians have taken up before, but Hobbs' work stands apart by approaching the phenomenon from a new angle. Even as she narrates the personal experiences of those who passed, she uses the wider phenomenon of passing to chart changing perceptions of racial difference in America.
Historians tend to think of passing as "an individualistic and opportunistic practice; a tool for getting ahead," Hobbs said. But cases like that of the Johnstons convinced Hobbs that there was another side to the story: that many who successfully "crossed over" did so with a heavy conscience.
"I'm not as interested in what people gained by being white, but rather in what they lost by not being black," Hobbs said. "To understand passing we can't just look at the story of the person who passed, we have to look at their whole social world, because everyone is going to be impacted."
Hobbs' book, then, is notable both for its sweeping historical scope from antebellum America to the present and for its intimate glimpses into individual lives.
Drawing from a range of source documents, including slave narratives, family archives, small-town historical societies' materials and magazines such as Life and Ebony, Hobbs details the sometimes triumphant, sometimes tragic stories of those who passed as white.
