tees's Blog

This is an old article, but interesting information nonetheless:

A Fur Rondy founder's secret reveals racial bigotry of Alaska, America

For more than 20 years, Anchorage's first paid fireman kept a secret that, if exposed, could have cost him everything: The wealth he accumulated through business and real estate investments; the power and status he acquired as an assemblyman, fire chief and civic booster; the attention he attracted from enamored women.

The secret that could unravel a lifetime's work?

Tom Bevers was a black man pretending to be a white man.

Credited with helping establish and name Fur Rendezvous, Bevers came to Anchorage in either 1920 or 1921 and quickly became one of the fledgling city's key figures.

He owned an apartment building with partner Emil Pfeil at Fourth Avenue and E Street. He helped start the Alaska Fur Farm Association, which ran an eight-acre mink farm in the South Addition. He was a member of the Elks Lodge. He helped develop the Buffalo Coal Mine near Chickaloon. He was a fan of the airport on what is now the Delaney Park Strip and kept the field clear of snow in the winter. In the 1941 city election, he kept his Assembly seat by claiming 772 of the 1,106 votes, more than any other winning candidate.

Bevers was 55 when he died of a heart attack while hunting geese with friends -- including Mayor William Stolt -- on Oct. 4, 1944. His death was front-page news.

What happened next never made the news, but it sent shock waves through Anchorage nonetheless: Bevers' sister came to Alaska to settle her brother's affairs, and to everyone's surprise, she was black.

So was Bevers. But his skin was light enough for him to pass as white.

Such subterfuge seems almost appalling today. Did he not respect his race enough to want to represent it?

But this was long before "black pride" became part of the American experience. Tom Bevers was no Uncle Tom. He was a man trying to exist in a world he knew would spurn him if it knew the truth.

"It was a matter of survival, absolutely," said longtime city employee Jewel Jones, who is black and in 1970 directed a program to bring more minorities into the city's workforce.

" 'Be black, be proud' goes without saying these days," she said, "but you really need to go past the current history and read about the whole Harlem Renaissance and the whole struggle of moving from the South to the North. It may not be in the regular history books, but go to those books devoted to the African struggle and you will learn that was the way people survived."

Bevers, who was born in South Boston, Va., never married, even though "he was reputed to be quite the ladies man and more than one woman asked him to marry her," according to an Anchorage Fire Department yearbook.

Knowing what we know now, it's safe to conclude Bevers stayed single because having children might have revealed his race.

Alaska has long been a place where hard work and good ideas can turn paupers into princes. If the truth had come out, wouldn't the people who worked and socialized with Bevers choose to judge him by his character and not his color?

Maybe. But not likely.

Louis Overstreet's "Black on a White Background," a history of blacks in Alaska, notes that well into the 1950s, Anchorage had only one hotel willing to let blacks in.

And consider the attitude expressed by Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, the head of the Alaska Defense Command during World War II, when he learned black troops would be stationed in Alaska to help build the Alaska Highway. Buckner warned in a letter to Army officials that high wages for unskilled labor might entice soldiers to stay, "with the natural result that they will interbreed with the Indians and Eskimos and produce an astonishingly objectionable race of mongrels ..."

That was the world Tom Bevers was born into in 1889, 24 years after the Civil War and 66 years before the Civil Rights Movement. In a still-untamed Alaska, where a man's history could start anew the day he arrived, Bevers saw a chance to reinvent himself. He took it.

http://dwb.adn.com/news/alaska/story/8622271p-8514873
c.html