Reluctantly, I agreed to keep her secret. “You can’t tell anyone until after I die. “How will I hold my head up with my friends?” she pleaded. When I questioned my mother about her black heritage, she seemed to shrink into herself. How had she deceived my racist father? Suddenly, certain behaviors fell into place - her avoidance of the sun, her meticulously applied makeup, her never wanting to visit New Orleans and, most telling, the absence of any photographs of my grandfather. Why hadn’t my mother told me? I wondered. When I walked into the Illinois family history center, I was a white woman. In that split second, everything I knew about myself changed. Azemar Frederic and his entire family were classified as black. In 1995, while scrolling through the 1900 Louisiana census records looking for my mother’s father, Azemar Frederic of New Orleans, I made a startling discovery. Why would I? I had only to look in the mirror to know the veracity of my whiteness - or so I thought. I had no reason to question my race or my racial heritage.
“ For the majority of my life, I believed I was a white woman.
Here’s what that taught me about racial identity.-GAIL LUKASIK My mother passed for white for most of her life.
#ALVERA FREDERIC PROFESSIONAL#
is a professional speaker, mystery novelist, and the author of the upcoming memoir, WHITE LIKE HER: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing (Skyhorse Oct. We would be sharing this story, written by Gail Lukasik who appeared on the 2015 Genealogy Roadshow. So she made sure that her secret was kept away. More so, Alvera Frederic married a very racist white man. Alvera was very ashamed of her black heritage, that she crossed over to the white side and made sure to remain as white as she can be. Gail Lukasik takes us through the story of how her mother, tried her best to hide her black identity. A story by Gail Lukasik the daughter of Alvera Frederic, exposes the secret of how her mother Alvera Frederic passed off as white and hid her black identity till death.
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