A selective chronology
The story keeps returning.
Books, films, and lives across a century of the American color line, each with its sources.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
A novel disguised as a confession, about a man who crosses the color line and spends the rest of his life counting what it cost.
Walter Francis White
A civil-rights leader whom strangers mistook for white, and who used that mistake to investigate lynchings for the NAACP.
Passing
Two women who grew up together meet again on either side of the color line, and neither can look away from the other.
Imitation of Life
A studio melodrama puts a Black daughter who can be read as white at the emotional center of the story, and the film cannot fully contain her.
Lost Boundaries
A New England doctor and his family, taken for white by their town for years, see their history made public, and the story becomes a Hollywood film.
Passing, reframed
Rebecca Hall's adaptation returns Nella Larsen's questions to the screen in a deliberately constrained black-and-white frame.