With the season finale of the Fade to White Podcast, Ep. 8, "Passing," host Jill Sim wishes to give thanks to you, the listeners!

See you in 2027!

The Fade to White Podcast Team

Jill Sim

Harrison Sim

Al Sim

Olivia Sim

With the discovery that Dr. Andrew J. Love and Anita Hemmings are both people of color who can pass for white, Jill has to reassess past preconceptions of their relationship dynamics, and try to guess whether their passing was a deliberate choice, and why.

After a car accident which prevents mobility, Jill takes the opportunity to read Black history and ponders whether there were any cultural or internalized aspects that could be considered 'Black' within herself or the family.

Jill begins to delve into the history of passing in America, looking at so-called 'new people' reinventing themselves during the Nadir of the Black American experience, and the ramifications within the family: alienation from other people, particularly other family.

Jill's discoveries lead to tension with a best friend, and to the challenging reunion over telephone with her oft absent great-aunt, Barbara, surviving child of Anita Hemmings and Dr. Love.

Anita Hemmings' great-granddaughter Jill Sim tells the story of Anita's experience at elite women's college Vassar, in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the fallout when it was learned before graduation that Anita had been passing for white the entire time.

Jill Sim looks at family connections to Boston Brahmin religious circles, and a segregated church culture during the period of rapid change given by immigration waves to Boston.

Within the complexities of a family’ of color’s tenuous standing in the shifting society, anti-Catholic and Irish sentiments simmer beneath ardent values of equity.

Jill looks at Boston Brahmins, the White Anglo Saxon Protestant class, and their ordered-up caste structure of the 19th century in the context of the Hemmings family, and their friends, who made up what sociologist Adelaide Cromwell termed: “The Other Brahmins.”

This episode contains historically racist language that may be offensive for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised.

Jill continues to dig for evidence of her black relatives and immediately encounters the stumbling block for every researcher of African American families in enslavement: black lives were largely unrecorded and unwritten before the 1870 federal census; the first time people emancipated with the Civil War are listed with full names, ages, and places of birth.

There are problems associated with the fallibility of human memory: names passed down through oral traditions by Jill’s grandmother Ellen, for Anita’s mother and grandmother, do not line up with the paper trail.

Jill decides to try and answer the larger question: why did the Hemmings family chose Boston over other American cities with larger African American populations?

Jill’s explorations of the family’s neighborhood in Boston’s Beacon Hill reveal a long and rich history of the presence of free African Americans; a unique community of people associated with the long struggle for freedom and equality.

“In genealogy, you start with yourself and work your way backwards…”

In March, 1997, Jill Sim writes an email to Vassar College, which had graduated both her grandmother and great-grandmother. Jill learns from Vassar’s Alumnae Association that her great-grandmother Anita Hemmings is considered the first African American graduate of the school.

This prompts Jill to reach out to the New England Genealogical Historical Society (NEHGS) in Boston to learn something about Anita’s background, and her parents.

In Episode Two, we look at the childhoods of Jill Sim's grandmother, Ellen, and her two siblings, Andy and Barbara, raised as solidly white middle class after their parents, Dr. Andrew and Anita Hemmings Love, make the decision to leave Boston and pass as white.