Hiding in Plain Site: Joveddah de Rajah & Co.

Joseph Downing on the right with the jewel in his turban alongside his 2nd wife Princess Olga (real name Olive M. Bultmann) and his assistant Costa Valata (African American real name unknown) reaped all the benefits and privileges associated with whiteness, as Joveddah de Rajah he successfully led a lifestyle as an 'East Indian Prince,' vaudeville entertainer, impostor, con artist, and popular Hindu reader and lecturer.

African Americans developed over the course of many decades to "pass" in the segregated South to cross the color line and temporarily, contingently, outwit the racial apartheid of Jim Crow. By the mid-20th century, stories of passing circulated widely in African American communities; many stories focused on individuals who had successfully passed as white in order to access better jobs and accommodations, but for those who were darker skinned, posing as a "Hindu" or "East Indian" was a recurring and prominent theme. One national black magazine wrote that "some of the race's best folk tales are tied up in turbans and a half dozen other ways negroes 'pass' down south."

History will probably never know which black southerner first employed this ruse, first discovered that it was possible to move across the line between "Negro" and "Hindu," from a denigrated to an exotic 'otherness,' from an unacceptable to a nominally acceptable blackness, by simply donning a different costume, speaking in a different way, performing a different identity.

Joseph Downing was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1886 to Edward Downing of Virginia and Alice Downing of England, Canada. He was one of three children. The daily horrors and incidents of terror the family witnessed resulting from racial intimidation shaped young Joseph's philosophy on life and his career decision to get into show business by pretending to be a mind reader from Asia. As Prince Joveddah he toured the Keith and Orpheum vaudeville circuits in Oregon, Rhode Island, Michigan, Montana, Massachusetts, Seattle, California, Pennsylvania, and Colorado between 1918 and 1937. Offstage, the prince only associated with men and women of affluence and upper class social standing. But while working the circuit for twenty years as an oriental mind reader and spiritual healer and as a radio announcer and lecturer, De Rajah appealed to unhappy single and married wealthy white women, who it appears he courted and eventually conned.

Using Buffalo, New York, as his headquarters, De Rajah marketed his profession through his book The Open Door: Laws of Life, his weekly radio program on WHN (1040 AM), and his fee based courses and public lectures.

Among his most amusing experiences while pretending to be from India were his trips to the South, especially Florida, where he resided in the fashionable hotels and bathed in the surf with white Northerners (always keeping his turban on).

Downing's first wife was a black woman. He eventually married two additional times (as De Rajah) to two different white women both from affluent backgrounds. Each of these marriages ended in divorce. He added his second and third wives in his act. Princess Olga his 2nd wife (from St. Louis) who passed herself off as an East Indian Princess who possessed 'great psychic powers.' The performance was billed and marketed as Joveddah De Rajah, the "Burmah Prince," along with his Princess Olga. Dazzling audiences the gimmick worked well for the racially mixed couple, as they entered and navigated a world in America free from the pressures and consequences of racism.

In the 1920s, Downing purchased over eighty acres in Idlewild, Michigan where he lived for a number of years.

With all his earlier fame and notoriety, Downing returned to Chicago in 1939, a broke man seeking employment. According to the Chicago Defender, "the once wealthy man was penniless .... but, with the support of friends he was able to start a radio program, at station WHIP, in which he starred as the Brown Brother. As the program met with little success, Downing was compelled to make his home with friends."

Downing died on December 7, 1941 in the pauper's ward of Cook County Hospital in Chicago.

Sources: University of Central Florida/ UCF Art Gallery, Paul Strand, Photographer (New York), Idlewild: The Rise, Decline, and Rebirth of a Unique African American Resort Town by Ronald J. Stephens