Chapter A Day

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Passing Strange by Martha A. Sandweiss

Monday, May 26 through Friday, June 20, 2025

Read by Melvin Hinton

Clarence King was a late 19th-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. 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.

LISTENER ADVISORY: This book contains language which listeners may find offensive.

THEME: “From the Black Belt” by William Grant Still performed by the Westchester Symphony Orchestra, Siegried Landau conductor

(Penguin Books; ISBN 10: 014311686X / ISBN 13 978-0143116868)