How an Interracial Marriage Sparked One of the Most Scandalous Trials of the Roaring Twenties

Contributing Writer

The New York Daily News accused the young woman of switching off the hallway light at her parents’ house so the reporters outside the door could only see her in semi-darkness.

“I’m not colored,” Alice Beatrice Jones told the newspaper, which published her comments in a November 14, 1924, article headlined “Blueblood Weds Colored Girl.” “I’m going to sue the papers that have called my father colored. I’m going to file suit for libel at 8 o’clock in the morning.”

Exactly a month earlier, on October 14, 25-year-old Alice had married 21-year-old Leonard Rhinelander, who went by the nickname Kip and was the scion of one of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families, in secret. The New Rochelle Standard Star broke the story on November 13, generating the media frenzy outside of the Joneses’ home.

“Is it true that you married the daughter of a colored man?” a reporter asked Leonard as he arrived on the scene in his family’s limousine. “Yes,” the newlywed replied, “and we are very happy.” Just two weeks later, however, Leonard filed suit to annul his marriage. Frightened into submission by his father’s threats to disinherit him, Leonard alleged that Alice had defrauded him into believing she was white.

Edith Wharton, the Gilded Age author whose novels examined the social strictures of upper-class New York, never explicitly wrote that her elite peers didn’t marry “colored” people. The daughter of a Rhinelander herself, Wharton didn’t need to make such sweeping statements. While New York State didn’t legally prohibit interracial marriage, Knickerbockers, as “aristocratic” Manhattanites were known at the time, tended to stick to their own.

The November 14, 1924, front page of the New York Daily News — The November 14, 1924, front page of the New York *Daily News* New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Still, as the eugenics movement gained traction in the early 20th century, American lawmakers took steps to ensure that those deemed racially inferior didn’t surreptitiously cross the color line. In Virginia, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 sought to prevent the inadvertent “intermixture of colored blood.” Broader measures like the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act created quotas for immigrants from specific countries, limiting the racial diversity of cities like New York, which one eugenicist referred to as a “cloaca gentium,” or sewer of the nations.

The Rhinelander family also turned to the law—specifically, the courts—to reassert the social order in an annulment case that captivated the nation between November 1924 and December 1925. Jazz Age advancements in media technology, including the rise of tabloid journalism, the widespread adoption of news photography and the emergence of radio, made it possible for the American public to follow the daily proceedings of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander in a wood-paneled courtroom in White Plains, New York.

While conducting research for their 2001 book on the case, Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White, historians Heidi Ardizzone and Earl Lewis found that every major city newspaper they consulted had covered the Rhinelander scandal in some capacity. “In New York, it was daily,” Ardizzone says. “Some of the papers had multiple editions. … And then, every Black newspaper covered it.”

The question at the center of the Rhinelander trial was this: Did Alice misrepresent herself to her husband as white and withhold her true racial ancestry?

Alice and Leonard first crossed paths in September 1921, when 18-year-old Leonard was enrolled at an inpatient clinic in Stamford, Connecticut, to undergo treatment for a speech impediment and shyness. After meeting Leonard by chance, Alice’s sister, Grace, introduced the soon-to-be couple, who spent the early days of their relationship going to the movies, taking drives in Leonard’s car and dining at the Jones household.

In the winter of 1922, a Rhinelander family lawyer interrupted the lovers’ two-week stay at an upscale hotel in New York. To end the relationship, Leonard’s father sent his son away for the better part of a two-year separation from Alice. Nevertheless, the couple continued their courtship by exchanging hundreds of letters. They reunited in New York in early 1924, when Leonard turned 21 and inherited $340,000 from his grandfather (around $6.3 million today). The couple kept their rekindled relationship—and subsequent marriage—a secret from Leonard’s family. After hearing a rumor that Alice and Leonard had secretly wed, Leonard’s father, Philip Rhinelander, sent a secretary to New Rochelle to inspect the marriage record in person. “The father’s sobs were heard plainly over the wire” when he received telephone confirmation, the Daily News reported.

A newspaper article about the case, featuring photos of Alice and Leonard Library of Congress

Did Philip go to great lengths to separate Leonard and Alice just because she was from the lower classes? While the father may have been in the dark about Alice being “colored,” the family chauffeur would testify at trial that Leonard was not. The driver, who was present at many of his young employer’s dalliances, said he’d confronted Leonard about dating the daughter of “a colored man.” As the chauffeur later told the court, Leonard said he didn’t “give a damn.”

Modern observers might wonder why racial misrepresentation was a matter for the court in 1924. While New York wasn’t among the 29 states that prohibited interracial marriage at the time, the social stigma and eugenics-related fears surrounding such unions caused the public to view the non-disclosure of one’s “colored” blood as an omission that could cause real harm.

Elizabeth Smith-Pryor, a historian at Kent State University and the author of Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing and the Protection of Whiteness, says the judge and the parties involved in the case essentially accepted, on its face, that misrepresentation of one’s race was “the kind of [alleged] fraud that reaches such a level that it hits at the essential [core of] marriage.” If the evidence supported Leonard’s case, the public generally agreed that he “should be allowed to end his marriage” over the deception.

For the Rhinelanders, fear of the social fallout of miscegenation, the common term for interracial marriages and sexual relationships at the time, wasn’t the only concern. As Smith-Pryor says, if Alice had given birth to Leonard’s child, this mixed-race member of the Rhinelander family would potentially have “access to [its] property, real estate, wealth [and] status in society.”

The Rhinelanders had a lot to lose, or at least a lot to risk falling into the wrong hands. The Daily News reported that the young groom was “heir to a fortune of $100,000,000 in Manhattan real estate” (around $1.8 billion today). The paper deemed the family’s holdings “second only to the Astors as owners of realty.”

The Rhinelanders couldn’t erase the facts of Leonard and Alice’s marriage from the annals of New York newspapers. But an annulment would serve their legal and social objectives better than a divorce. Until 1967, adultery, with few exceptions, was the only grounds for the legal dissolution of a marriage in New York State. Divorce might not extinguish Alice’s claims to Rhinelander property; she could still receive alimony.

“An annulment creates a legal fiction that a marriage never existed, … that it never really happened,” says Smith-Pryor. Socially, an annulment allowed the Rhinelanders to backtrack on the marriage and deny that one of their own had tainted the family name they’d cultivated over more than 225 years in America.

An informal photograph of Alice Bettmann via Getty Images

Leonard relaxing on a chair Bettmann via Getty Images

Family primogenitor Philip Jacob Rhinelander, a German-born Huguenot, was among the first Europeans to settle in New Rochelle in the late 17th century. Over the next two centuries, the Rhinelanders amassed wealth through shipbuilding, sugar refinement and real estate. Leonard’s uncle T.J. Oakley Rhinelander, who co-directed the Rhinelander Real Estate Company with Leonard’s father, was widely known in New York as one of the Gilded Age “Four Hundred,” a rarefied circle more exclusive than those listed in the Social Register.

Alice’s parents, meanwhile, had immigrated to the United States from England in 1891. While George Jones had once worked as a cab driver and his wife, Elizabeth, in the domestic service, by 1924, George owned several small New Rochelle properties that he also managed. Elizabeth was retired.

The family’s humble circumstances were news alone, but it was the claim that George was “colored,” a word used synonymously with Black in the 1920s, that caused the greatest furor. In the eyes of the public, the Rhinelander marriage threatened both the family name and the racial purity of the country as a whole.

Millions of African Americans migrated north in the decades following World War I, confounding efforts to police the color line in many cities. In small Southern towns, Smith-Pryor says, everyone knew the racial backgrounds of people in their community, regardless of complexion. “What if they move north?” she asks. “Who knows who they are? No one knows them anymore.”

The Joneses’ hazy origins in England presented a similar problem for the Rhinelanders. The annulment trial was delayed until November 1925 so the plaintiffs could travel across the pond to investigate the family’s background.

In the 1900 and 1910 censuses, enumerators recorded all of the members of the Jones household as white. In 1920, Alice, who was then residing at her employer’s home, was listed as “mulatto,” then the official term (now considered derogatory) for the child of white and Black parents. It was a label she resented: As the New York Times later reported, when government inspectors visited an athletic club where Jones worked during World War I to document foreign nationals employed there, they “did not ask her color but put her down as ‘mulatto.’” According to Alice’s former supervisor, Alice expressed unfamiliarity with the term. “When I told her it meant that she was colored, Alice began to sob and warmly denied that it was true,” the supervisor said. In 1924, Alice recorded herself as white on her marriage license application.

The night that news of her marriage broke, Alice told the Daily News, “I can prove my father and my mother are both English. … Father was born in Coventry, in Leicestershire, and mother came from Alford.” As if the family’s English ancestry alone were enough to set it outside of America’s binary racial categories, she added, “There’s not a drop of West Indian blood in our veins. Father’s English.”

In an affidavit responding to the Rhinelander complaint, George struck a more cautious tone, saying, “My mother was a Caucasian of pure English descent. The only information which I have about my father is that he was a native of one of the British colonies.”

Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist who consults for the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service and has made headlines for tracing the Irish roots of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, says, “Many official documents, such as census and birth records of the relevant time frame, did not include columns for race in England, though most in the U.S. at that time did.” The United Kingdom never formally prohibited interracial marriage, nor did it mandate racial segregation as the U.S. did. George’s affidavit acknowledged that this information simply wasn’t available in British government records.

“If George was vague about his origins, it may well have been because he genuinely didn't know,” Smolenyak says.

When the annulment trial commenced in November 1925, Alice’s attorney, Lee Davis, surprised the plaintiff and the nation by announcing, “The defense counsel hereby withdraws the previous denial as to the blood of this defendant, and for the purpose of this trial … admits that she has some colored blood.” Alice’s father, says Smith-Pryor, “didn’t mind being called ‘colored,’ but he didn’t want to be called ‘Negro.’”

Leonard "Kip" Rhinelander (right) sits next to his attorneys during the 1925 annulment proceedings. Bettmann via Getty Images

As Smith-Pryor writes in her book, “In Great Britain, the term ‘colored’ encompassed people with African, West Indian, South Asian or Arab ancestry.” When news of the marriage broke, one of Alice’s attorneys told reporters that George’s forebears were from India, not the West Indies. Perhaps the defense’s concession that George and Alice were “colored” was a compromise with American racism, a way of acknowledging they were “people of color” without conceding that they were “Negro.”

Nell Irvin Painter, a historian at Princeton University, notes that “colored” wasn’t a catch-all term for non-white in 1924. “It’s more about two things,” she explains, the first of which was respect. In the early 20th century, the word “Negro,” often written in lowercase, “looked like an insult and also was uncomfortably close to the N-word.” The phrase “colored,” Painter adds, took into account “the actual skin color of a lot of the most visible people of African descent in the North. They were light-skinned, and a lot of them didn’t want to be called ‘Negro.’”

With the source of Alice’s dark complexion unknown, Davis generally took care to avoid referring to her as a “Negro” during the trial, apparently because he knew her African DNA might be remote. At the same time, he went to some length to leave the impression on the jury that the blood coursing through her veins was likely of African origin. This ambiguity created a Rorschach test that allowed Americans to hear what they wanted to hear—and not just white Americans.

“There was a lot at stake for all African Americans whether or not [Alice] wanted to be counted with them, or should be,” Ardizzone says.

The court case fundamentally centered on the acceptance of Black people as equals in American society. Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux capitalized on the publicity surrounding the trial, advertising his latest film, The House Behind the Cedars, with the caption “Amazing Parallel to the Famous Rhinelander Case!” Adapted from Charles Chesnutt’s 1900 novel of the same name, the film’s heroine is a mixed-race woman who passes for white and is wooed by a white millionaire. Micheaux screened unauthorized footage from the Rhinelander trial when he exhibited the film in Harlem.

The admission that Alice was “colored” was key to the defense’s argument. Anyone could plainly see that she wasn’t white, Davis said. According to Smith-Pryor, the defense argued, “There’s no fraud here! [Leonard] had to have known. [He] met the whole family. How could he not have known?” After all, Alice’s sister was married to a Black man, and Leonard had interacted with his future brother-in-law well before 1924.

Kip had met Alice in 1921 at a clinic where he was being treated for extreme shyness and a stutter, and where she worked. Her British mother is white, her father of mixed Black and white ancestry. Fearing scandal, the parents of both try to dissuade them from the romance. 2/5 pic.twitter.com/SCmYrJyzgP
— 100YearsAgoNews (@100YearsAgoNews) October 14, 2024

Neither Alice nor her father ever took the stand. In what lingers as the most infamous moment of the trial, Alice’s counsel offered the all-male jury a glimpse of what Leonard had seen during the intimate moments of the couple’s three-year courtship—in other words, wrote Lewis and Ardizzone in Love on Trial, the lawyers exhibited Alice’s bare legs and torso, which they believed would “prove that her race was obvious in her physical appearance.” According to official court transcript:

[The judge; the attorneys]; the jury; the plaintiff; the defendant; her mother, Mrs. George Jones; and the stenographer left the courtroom and entered the jury room. The defendant and Mrs. Jones then withdrew to the lavatory … and, after a short time, again entered the jury room. The defendant, who was weeping, had on her underwear and a long coat. At Mr. Davis’ direction, she let down her coat, so that the upper portion of her body, as far down as the breast, was exposed. She then, again at Mr. Davis’ direction, covered the upper part of her body and showed the jury her bare legs, up as far as her knees.

With this strategy, the defense effectively backed the Rhinelander side into asking the jury, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”

In December 1925, the all-white, all-male jury denied Leonard an annulment. As Davis had assured the jury in his closing argument, “We are not going by our verdict to compel Leonard Rhinelander to live with Alice Rhinelander. … You are only called here to decide whether at this juncture, these two should be separated on the ground of fraud. It must be apparent to each and every one of you that these two young people can never live together.”

In the years that followed, Leonard unsuccessfully appealed the outcome of the trial. It was only in late 1930 that the former couple finally reached a settlement, with Leonard agreeing to pay Alice a lump sum of $31,500 (around $600,000 today) and $3,600 (nearly $70,000 today) annually, an amount that would not be adjusted to account for inflation. In exchange, Alice promised to never publicly discuss the Rhinelanders and to renounce any future use of the Rhinelander name.

Leonard died of pneumonia in February 1936. Just 32 years old and unmarried, he inherited the eternal grave before he could receive his earthly inheritance. His premature death marked the morbid fulfillment of his attorney’s closing argument at the annulment trial. Addressing the jury, the lawyer had said, “There isn’t a father among you … who would not rather see his son in his casket than to see him wedded to a mulatto woman.”

In 1930, the U.S. Census Bureau, bowing to pressure from eugenicists, eliminated the mulatto racial classification, instructing census takers that “a person of mixed white and Negro blood should be returned as a Negro, no matter how small the percentage of Negro blood.” That year, the enumerator marked down Alice’s father, George, then 75 years old, as “Neg” for “Negro.” In the space for his father’s country of origin, the enumerator, perhaps at George’s insistence, wrote “India.”

Alice, who appeared in New York’s 1925 state census as “Alice J. Rhinelander,” shows up in the 1930 census with the Rhinelander surname, as the data was collected before her divorce settlement was finalized. While her father was recorded in the state census as “B” for Black, Alice escaped that designation in 1925. The census was taken before the trial began that year, so perhaps the census taker gave her the benefit of the doubt in marking her down as white. The 1930 census shows that the enumerator, a woman, initially recorded Alice as white. Then, she crossed out that entry and wrote “Neg” for “Negro.”

Alice never remarried, despite living until age 90. Ardizzone learned of Alice’s 1989 death while researching her book in the late 1990s. It was the first major work on the Rhinelander case, predating “the digital world that we are in today,” she says. Ardizzone didn’t know if Alice was alive or dead until she visited the Jones family plot at Beechwoods Cemetery in New Rochelle. “I literally tripped over her horizontal, flat commemorative stone,” the author recalls. “I looked down and saw ‘Alice Rhinelander.’” In death, Alice had restored to herself the name she’d been denied in life.