Joseph Downing

Joseph A. Downing was an African American man born in Joliet, Illinois who passed himself off as Joveddah De Rajah, "The East Indian Psychic." He played the role onstage and off. In public, he always spoke with a pseudo-Indian accent and wore a turban and other garments that helped foster the illusion that he was a seer from India. He traveled with his white Canadian born wife, Olga posing as a Central Asian, she called herself Princess Olga. They did mind readings for startled audiences. In the mid-1920s, Joveddah sold his "words of Oriental comfort and wisdom" on a New York area radio station WFBH with a show called, 'Joveddah de Rajah Oriental Mystic.'

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.

Sources: The Karma of Black Folk by Vjay Prashad;
Vaudeville, Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers Vol. 1 by Frank Cullen; Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America by Vivek Bald; Studio Strand in NY (1922), Paul Strand, Photographer; University of Washington/Sayre Collection