KATHLEEN A. HAUKE
THE "PASSING" OF ELSIE ROXBOROUGH
Driving her fashionable Ford roadster from Detroit to Ann Arbor,
Elsie Roxborough arrived at the University of Michigan as a freshman fifty years ago last fall. She was the first Negro student to live
in a University dormitory. Her classmate Arthur Miller, an aspiring
playwright and fellow reporter on the campus newspaper, called
her "a beauty, the most striking girl in Ann Arbor. She was lightskinned and very classy. To a kid like me, she seemed svelte, knowing, witty, sexy." With her own group in Detroit, the Roxane Players, she produced Langston Hughes's play Drums of Haiti, and
charmed Hughes as she had charmed boxer Joe Louis some years
earlier. Elsie Roxborough was "the girl I was in love with" in 1937,
Hughes wrote in his autobiography.2 Upon graduation, Roxborough
"passed" into the white world. The next time most of her friends
heard of her was in 1949 when an eight-column headline in the
black newspaper Michigan Chronicle announced her death from an
overdose of sleeping pills. Hughes kept her photograph over his writing table for the rest of his life.
Who was Elsie Roxborough? What became of her, and what did
she represent? A piecing together of her life suggests that her fate
was to dramatize the truth of Hughes's poem "House in the World":
I'm looking for a house
In the world
Where the white shadows
Will not fall.
There is no house,
Dark brother,
No such house
At all.
Elsie Roxborough started out to shake the stigma of color; when that
proved impossible, she joined step with the oppressor. Her life as a
disguised alien in the middle reaches of the white social register did
not satisfy her ambition or her pride. Perhaps no happy ending
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