by Josh Levin
It’s possible that she held all those jobs. Considering the lies she told the police about every other facet of her biography, it’s also possible she was never an usherette, an apartment manager, or a factory worker. Either way, she didn’t derive much benefit from the Bay Area’s wartime economic boom—she was not, in reality or in her imagination, a welder or a riveter or a carpenter. Her lack of formal schooling in Tennessee and Arkansas certainly would’ve placed some limits on her work prospects. Anti-black animus, too, could’ve been a factor in limiting the young mother’s options.
It’s telling, though, that no official records issued in California labeled her a “Negro.” The 1945 arrest report for Connie Reed identified her as both white and Mexican. A year later, the Oakland police said Betty Smith was white with a dark complexion. Connie Harbaugh’s 1948 booking report had her down as white and Hawaiian. Abbreviations on government forms—W, N, Mex, Haw—didn’t necessarily reflect public perception. Growing up in Arkansas, she’d been classified as white on the 1930 and 1940 censuses, but the white people she’d crossed paths with hadn’t seen her as one of them. Still, it’s plausible that no one in California aside from Hubert Mooney knew about her racial background.
During Martha Louise White’s childhood in the 1920s and 1930s, the “tragic mulatta”—a woman, typically wracked with self-loathing, whose surreptitious forays into white society lead to personal catastrophe—became a stock character in literature and film, with popular sensations such as Show Boat and Imitation of Life dramatizing the perils of passing. Magazines also printed the confessionals of women faced with the temptation to live as white. “If I accepted this offer I could go anywhere I wanted. I could do anything I wanted, without question. No saleswoman would ever again refuse to sell me a dress. No hotel clerk would refuse me a room. No head waiter would deny me a table,” wrote light-skinned actor Janice Kingslow in “I Refuse to Pass,” an essay published in Negro Digest in 1950. “What good was fame or money if I lost myself?” she asked. “[Passing] meant stripping my life clear of everything that I was.…Conscience wrestled with dreams of fame and money, and conscience won.”
On the one hand, these fictional and nonfictional narratives constituted an admission that a person’s racial identity can shift depending on factors that have nothing to do with biology. On the other, they affirmed the near-consensus view that the “one-drop rule” was a fundamental law of nature. It was in no way misleading or inaccurate for the former Martha Louise White to call herself a white woman. She was, after all, just as much white as she was black. But in the first half of the twentieth century, men and women with some “percentage of Negro blood” were presented with a false choice: Either live an honest life as a Negro or perpetrate a deceit by passing as white.
Connie Harbaugh didn’t accept that premise. While Janice Kingslow feared that passing might cause her to lose herself, that wasn’t a concern for a woman who’d been taught from birth that her nonwhite heritage was a secret shame. In view of the hatred she’d experienced during her youth in Arkansas, the possibility of “stripping [her] life clear of everything that [she] was” likely would’ve seemed more alluring than terrifying. Besides, given that she’d gone by at least eight different names in her first twenty-two years, what true self did she have to lose?
When Connie Harbaugh was arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor on March 18, 1948, the police described her as a Hawaiian female with foreign-born parents. At the top of the form, her race and age were written in shorthand as “W-21.” Two weeks after that arrest, Alameda County issued a marriage certificate listing her as Connie Martha Louise White, a twenty-one-year-old born in Tennessee. Her mother was recorded as Lydia Miller from Alabama, while her father was purported to be Marvin White, the man Lydia had married and divorced in the 1920s. He was designated, implausibly, a native of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, while the bride and groom were both marked as white in the field reserved for “color or race.”
In this context, her assumption of a white identity was less a choice than a necessity. Interracial marriage was illegal in California, with the civil code decreeing that “no license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian, or member of the Malay race.” The state considered Mexican men and women to be white for the purposes of the marriage, while “the Malay race” may or may not have included Hawaiians, depending on which anthropologist or lawyer you consulted.**
The Supreme Court of California would declare the state’s miscegenation ban unconstitutional six months after Connie Martha Louise White’s wedding. But as of March 1948, Alameda County wouldn’t have sanctioned a marriage between a white man and a Negro woman. Concocting a phony Hawaiian lineage allowed the bride-to-be to account for the color of her skin while still conforming to the state’s parameters for whiteness.
California bureaucrats might not have been the only audience for this fabricated backstory. She may have wanted her new husband to think she was Hawaiian, too.
* * *
Paul Harbaugh, like his wife, had never had the chance to form a bond with his father. When Paul was five years old, Joseph Harbaugh Sr. had been killed in one of the worst mining accidents in American history, an explosion in Mather, Pennsylvania, that took the lives of 195 men. As a teenager, Paul had worked at the mine company’s general store, selling furniture, garden tools, and household goods. But rather than stay in Mather and pursue a career underground, Paul had seized an opportunity to get out of Western Pennsylvania, enlisting in the U.S. Navy in September 1942.
The blond-haired, blue-eyed nineteen-year-old arrived at Illinois’s Great Lakes Naval Training Center—the base where Linda Taylor would meet another of her husbands, Lamar Jones, in 1974—at around the same time as the navy’s first black seamen, a group that took its classes in a segregated facility. Harbaugh spent six weeks in a white-only camp training to become an aviation support equipment technician, then served stateside for two years before shipping out to the Pacific island of Saipan for the duration of World War II. He reenlisted after the war, eventually getting assigned to the USS General A. E. Anderson as a boatswain’s mate. The troop transport, which ferried personnel and supplies from the West Coast to bases in Hawaii and the Pacific Theater, typically came and went from San Francisco Bay. He likely met Connie Martha Louise White during one of the ship’s frequent West Coast stopovers. Their March 1948 wedding came two days before he sailed to Guam, Japan, China, and the Philippines.
Harbaugh looked as though he’d been born to wear a uniform. The strongly built, square-jawed sailor stood five foot seven and weighed 175 pounds, and he wore his hair in a crew cut. Although he could plaster on a mean mug for a posed portrait, he smiled easily and broadly. At twenty-five years old, he was excited to become a parent. In November 1948, he told a California judge he wanted to adopt his wife’s son. His petition said that Connie Harbaugh had been unmarried at the time of Clifford’s birth, “that the father of said minor has never supported him or had custody of him,” and that he was “well able and anxious to care for, maintain, and educate” the eight-year-old boy. The petition also indicated that Connie would soon have another child. She’d give birth in December 1948. The Harbaughs would name their son Paul Phillip.
Connie Harbaugh’s life seemed to settle down in the months following her wedding. The Oakland Police Department didn’t find cause to arrest her, and she found socially respectable employment—the city phone directory listed her as Mrs. Paul Harbaugh, dressmaker. But Paul and Connie wouldn’t build a life together in California. At around the time their next child was born, in January 1950, the navy reassigned Paul to the country’s largest inland base, a facility outside Memphis where he’d teach airplane maintenance and repair to enlisted sailors. The Harbaughs lived east of the Mississippi River in Raleigh, Tennessee, a short drive from Golddust and the cotton plantations of northeast Arkansas. Connie Harbaugh’s third son, Johnnie, would be born just a few miles from the farms w
here his mother had grown up.
* * *
It didn’t take long for the Harbaughs’ marriage to unravel. In the late fall of 1950, Connie took their two youngest children and drove off in her family’s newly purchased Pontiac, explaining that she was going to see her parents in Arkansas. She called her husband from the road, demanding a couple of hundred dollars. She said that Paul “would be sorry” if he didn’t do what she wanted.
In the divorce complaint he’d file in 1951, Paul Harbaugh wouldn’t reveal whether he’d acceded to Connie’s wishes. He would say that she’d lied about every element of her trip: Her father “was not living,” her mother was in Missouri rather than Arkansas, and she’d actually set out for “St. Louis and other places.” When she came back after a month on the road, their one-year-old and two-year-old sons “were filthy, dirty, and their clothes were torn, and they appeared to have been uncared for for many days.” It was during this family reunion that Connie told Paul she wanted a divorce. She also said she was pregnant.
Paul didn’t believe this unborn child was his, and he didn’t agree to sign the papers his wife pushed in front of him. Annoyed by his noncompliance, Connie again took the children and disappeared. She reemerged two weeks later, confronting him at the naval base with those same divorce papers. Paul once more refused to sign the documents, citing advice from a navy legal officer and a chaplain. She replied with “vile and obscene language,” he’d say in the complaint, unleashing a stream of profanities “in the presence of their two small children, and in the presence of others standing nearby.” She then grabbed the kids and dropped out of sight for another three and a half months.
Paul Harbaugh’s divorce complaint described Connie as a cruel and often absent mother and a willfully malicious partner. She had a penchant for “writing to his superior officers in the Navy and to the American Red Cross, claiming that he was not sending her any money”—a practice that “caused him a great deal of trouble, embarrassment, and humiliation.” She’d also tried blackmail. On May 8, 1951, a few months after cursing him out at the naval base, she insisted that he send her money, or else she would “disclose certain facts to the Navy which might cause him considerable embarrassment and difficulty.”
The complaint alleged that Connie was an inveterate liar, and that she’d obscured key elements of her pre-California life. Although she’d “led him to believe that she had never previously been married and that she was a respectable and virtuous girl,” Paul had learned after their wedding day that she’d “had an illegitimate child by another man.” That child was Connie’s son Clifford. In 1948, Paul had told a judge in California that he was “well able and anxious to care for, maintain, and educate” the then eight-year-old. In 1951, he reframed that adoption proceeding as another component of his wife’s deception.
In his bill for divorce, Paul Harbaugh said that Connie was “not a fit and proper person to have the custody and care of their children.” He asked the circuit court of Shelby County, Tennessee, to either award him custody of Paul Phillip and Johnnie or give him permission “to place said children in a reputable home.” He made no mention of Clifford, nor did he file any paperwork relating to Connie’s daughter, Sandra, after she was born in August 1951. (Sandra’s birth certificate recorded her father as Paul Harbaugh and her mother as Connie M. Miller, a white woman born in San Francisco.) In January 1952, a Shelby County judge granted Paul the divorce he’d requested, finding Connie Martha Louise White Harbaugh “guilty of such cruel and inhuman treatment or conduct towards the complainant as renders cohabitation unsafe and improper.” The judge made no ruling on who’d get the children, who were living with Connie in Arkansas and thus outside the court’s jurisdiction.
Paul would wait just five months before getting remarried. The navy man would tell his new wife, Jean, that he’d figured out very quickly that his first marriage had been a horrible mistake. Even though Connie had initially been the one to push for a separation, Paul told Jean that he’d finagled a transfer to the South to evade California’s strict divorce laws, which required that one spouse prove the other had committed a wrongful act or was incurably insane.*** He said that Connie had turned his own mother against him—that she’d somehow convinced Gertrude Harbaugh that Paul was to blame for the dissolution of their marriage, and that Gertrude had gone so far as to send Connie money. He never mentioned anything about his ex-wife’s race, but Jean, a white twenty-two-year-old from West Memphis, Arkansas, believed Connie must not have been honest with him about her parentage. She didn’t think Paul would’ve married Connie if he’d been aware of all the branches in her family tree.
Jean Harbaugh crossed paths with her husband’s first wife only twice. One of those encounters came when she tagged along on a trip to Connie’s house in Arkansas. Paul and Jean didn’t make it inside. Connie wouldn’t stop cursing at her ex-husband, calling him a no-good son of a bitch and shouting “Fuck you!” Jean was terrified—she’d never heard a woman lose control like that. Later, the two Mrs. Harbaughs sat across from each other at a court hearing relating to Paul and Connie’s divorce decree. In that setting, Connie looked and sounded prim and polite, a transformation that Jean found even more unsettling.
Connie was inscrutable and relentless, and she seemed willing to say or do anything to get what she wanted. Once, Jean had a nightmare that culminated with Connie hissing, “Your name will never be Jean Harbaugh.” When Jean and Paul bought a house on the outskirts of Memphis, they placed the property under the names of Jean’s parents. That small subterfuge, they hoped, would make it harder for Connie to get at their money, and to find them.
Jean, who had a young daughter of her own from a previous marriage, hadn’t spent any time with her husband’s children. She did know that his son Paul Phillip had darker skin than the other kids. It was difficult for her to imagine raising a mixed-race family in such a deeply segregated city. A year after Paul and Jean got married, in the spring and summer of 1953, a white mob threatened to kill the handful of black residents who’d bought houses on East Olive Street in South Memphis. While some black homeowners heeded the warning and cleared out of the neighborhood, a forty-five-year-old utility worker and his fifty-three-year-old sister refused to move. At one thirty on a Monday morning in late June, a stick of dynamite exploded on the front porch of their two-story house, shattering windows and blasting a hole a foot away from a brick support column. The brother and sister were unharmed, as were the three children who’d been inside the home, the youngest of whom was six years old. “I guess they meant to hurt us,” the utility worker said, “but we’re staying.”
A white family raising a dark-skinned child, Jean Harbaugh believed, would invite their neighbors’ wrath. It just wasn’t tenable. In May 1953, Jean and Paul had a son of their own, naming him Paul Harbaugh Jr. A few weeks before the newborn’s arrival, the Shelby County Circuit Court had modified its original divorce decree, deeming Connie Harbaugh a “suitable and proper person” to care for Paul Phillip, Johnnie, and Sandra—the children she claimed were born of her brief and tempestuous marriage—and ordering her ex-husband to pay her $50 each month in child support. Paul Harbaugh was given the right “to visit his said children at reasonable and seasonable times.” He never did.
* In addition to writing for the Washington Post, Agnes E. Meyer served as the newspaper’s vice president. Her husband, Eugene Meyer, had purchased the Post in 1933, and her daughter Katharine Graham would later run the enterprise.
** The language about Malay people had been added by the California legislature in 1933 with the intent of barring marriages between whites and Filipinos.
*** In her 1948 divorce filing, the actor Jane Wyman had been forced to argue that her husband, Ronald Reagan, had subjected her to “extreme mental cruelty.” This experience likely contributed to Reagan’s decision to sign the nation’s first no-fault divorce law in 1969, two years after being sworn in as California’s governor.
Chapter 14
&nbs
p; I’ll Sue the Hell out of Them
As a small child in the 1950s, Johnnie Harbaugh saw Louisiana from inside a white Oldsmobile and Texas from the back seat of a little green Nash. Johnnie and his siblings never knew where they might be going, or how long they’d stay once they got there. When it was time to move on to the next place, they’d pack up their belongings, climb inside a station wagon or sedan, and hope their mother would steer them away from trouble.
Johnnie got used to being a passenger, the feeling of being carried through the world by forces beyond one’s control. Although he couldn’t keep track of all the people he’d met and places he’d been, he never forgot his mother’s first new ride. Not long after she got it, he watched that 1957 Ford burn up. Back then, he thought racists had set it ablaze. Later, he wondered if the police had questioned his mother because she’d stolen that new car.
Connie Harbaugh had moved back to the South in the late 1940s, but she never really settled there. In his 1951 divorce complaint, Paul Harbaugh wrote that she’d whisked their children away without warning, then brought them back in a diminished state before running off with them again. In her husband’s view, this was an obvious case of parental abuse, albeit one he’d done nothing to stop. Her children didn’t know what to think of their calamitous lives. At times, they saw themselves and their mother as victims of an unjust world. At others, they felt as though they were getting lashed around by an unstable woman’s cruel whims.
