The Johnstons’ friends seemed to realize that the family had not been passing as white, but as Americans.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2013-12-20 21:18Z by Steven

The Johnstons’ friends seemed to realize that the family had not been passing as white, but as Americans.

Robert McG. Thomas, Jr., “Thyra Johnston, 91, Symbol Of Racial Distinctions, Dies,” The New York Times, November 29, 1995. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/29/us/thyra-johnston-91-symbol-of-racial-distinctions-dies.html.

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Thyra Johnston, 91, Symbol Of Racial Distinctions, Dies

Posted in Articles, Biography, History, Media Archive, Passing, United States, Women on 2013-12-19 09:50Z by Steven

Thyra Johnston, 91, Symbol Of Racial Distinctions, Dies

The New York Times
1995-11-29

Robert McG. Thomas, Jr. (1939-2000)

Thyra Johnston, a blue-eyed fair-skinned New Hampshire homemaker who became a symbol of the silliness of racial distinctions when she and her husband announced that they were black, died on Nov. 22 at her home in Honolulu. She was 91.

She was the real-life heroine of “Lost Boundaries,” a movie that stunned the nation in 1949.

It is doubtful that Norman Rockwell could have dreamed up a family that better epitomized the small-town Depression-era American ideal than Albert and Thyra Johnston and their four children.

Dr. Johnston, who was born in Chicago, graduated with honors from the University of Chicago Medical School and studied radiology at Harvard. He was such a respected figure that in the 10 years that he practiced in Gorham, N.H., he headed the school board, was a selectman, was president of the county medical society and became chairman of the local Republican Party.

Mrs. Johnston, who was born in New Orleans, grew up in Boston and married her husband when he was a medical student, and was at once a model homemaker and mother and a civic and social leader whose well-appointed home in exclusive Prospect Hill was the scene of the annual Christmas social of the Congregational Church.

But Mrs. Johnston, described by her son Albert Jr. as looking as Irish as any of her neighbors, had a secret. In a society of such perverse attitudes that black “blood” was simultaneously scorned and regarded as so powerful that the tiniest trace was considered the defining racial characteristic, she was born one-eighth black, enough to qualify her as “Negro” on her birth certificate…

Read the entire obituary here.

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