During the Jim Crow era, segregation depended on strict racial categories: a person was either Black or white, inferior or superior, barred or welcomed. Rev. Jesse Routte exposed the idiocy of that system in a remarkable way, not through protests or speeches, but through clothing. In the 1940s, he carried out a quiet but devastating experiment that exposed the absurd logic of segregation. By wearing a turban and adopting a foreign accent, he moved through the Jim Crow South with ease, welcomed where Black Americans were routinely insulted, threatened, or expelled. What changed was not who he was, but how he appeared.
What Jim Crow Was
Jim Crow was a system of laws, customs, and violence that enforced racial segregation in the United States, especially in the South, from the late nineteenth century through the mid twentieth century. Under Jim Crow, Black Americans were denied equal access to schools, transportation, housing, restaurants, hotels, voting booths, and public spaces. Signs reading “White Only” and “Colored” governed daily life.
The system was upheld not only by law, but by intimidation. African Americans who challenged segregation risked arrest, beatings, or worse. Even successful, educated Black professionals were expected to submit. A Black man could be a minister, a professor, or a veteran and still be humiliated for trying to sit in the wrong train car, drink from the wrong water fountain or eat in the wrong restaurant.
This was the world Rev. Jesse Routte navigated.
Jesse W. Routte was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and educated in the United States. He graduated from Augustana College and Augustana Theological Seminary in Rock Island, Illinois, a Swedish Lutheran institution where he was once the only Black student.
He was ordained in 1932 by the New York United Lutheran Synod and became pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Jamaica, Queens, where he served for more than a decade.
Routte was not only a minister. He was also a singer and pianist who traveled for professional engagements. These trips brought him face to face with the realities of Jim Crow.
In 1943, Routte traveled to Mobile, Alabama, for a family engagement, an experience that left a lasting mark on him. Like many Black professionals on the road, he was subjected to routine humiliation. Trains, restaurants, hotels, and public spaces enforced racial rules designed to remind Black people of their assigned place. Education, polished dress, and even clerical status offered no shield. In Jim Crow America, a Black minister was still treated as just a Black man.
He later described it bluntly: he had been “Jim Crowed here, Jim Crowed there, Jim Crowed all over the place.” He was insulted, pushed around, and reminded at every turn that his education and clerical collar offered no protection.
He did not forget.
Four years later, in 1947, Routte returned to Alabama with a plan. He rented a turban from a New York costumer, paired it with velvet robes, and decided to present himself as a foreign visitor. Just before boarding a segregated train in Washington, D.C., he wrapped the turban around his head and began speaking with what he described as a “slight Swedish accent.”
The timing mattered. On segregated trains, Black passengers were restricted to inferior cars. When lunchtime came and the train reached North Carolina, Routte walked into the dining car reserved for white passengers. The only open seat was at a table with two white couples.
One man looked at him and asked, “Well, what have we got here?”
Routte replied calmly, in his accent, “We have here an apostle of goodwill and love.”
The table fell silent. Then, they let him sit.
That moment told him everything he needed to know.
From that point on, Routte maintained the role. He ate freely in dining cars and restaurants where no Black American had ever been served. In Mobile and Montgomery, he entered establishments that enforced segregation with pride.
At one upscale restaurant, Routte tested the system directly. He asked the head waiter what would happen if a Negro came in to be served. The response was immediate and confident: “No Negro would dare come in here to eat.”
Routte stroked his chin and ordered dessert.
In another encounter, he asked a similar question to a Mobile police captain. The answer was even more revealing: “If a Negro gives any trouble we just knock him down.”
No one ever asked Routte if he was Black. His turban, robes, and accent had removed him from the racial category that Jim Crow targeted. White civic leaders, merchants, police officials, treated him with courtesy. Wherever he went, across social classes, he was welcomed.
Later, he said he felt “like a paratrooper behind enemy lines.”
Routte was not the only Black American to exploit this contradiction. Harlem nightclub owner Dicky Wells styled himself the “Maharajah of Hattan” and traveled with white patrons on cruises to Nassau and Cuba. Joseph Downing of Illinois reinvented himself as “Prince Jovedah de Rajah,” advising white bankers and staying in elite hotels in Miami and Palm Beach that barred Black guests.
Then there was Korla Pandit, a celebrated television organist who cultivated a mysterious Indian persona. Audiences were told he was the son of a French opera singer and an Indian father from New Delhi. In reality, he was John Roland Redd, the son of an African American minister from Missouri.
But there was a crucial difference.
According to scholars, Rev. Jesse Routte stands alone among these figures as someone who used disguise explicitly as a political statement. His goal was not personal escape or career advancement. It was exposure.
When his story appeared in The New York Times, it spread quickly by the standards of the 1940s.
The story was soon picked up by the Black press and major publications across the country. Readers immediately grasped what Routté had exposed: white hostility toward Black Americans was not rational, moral, or consistent. It was reactive and symbolic. Something as simple as a turban could change everything.
According to later accounts, shortly after news of the trip broke, Routté received a phone call at his home from Ku Klux Klan leaders, who threatened to kill him. The threats did not remain verbal. The Klan burned a cross on the family’s front lawn, a direct warning meant to terrorize and silence. Fearing for their safety, Jesse and his wife sent their children to live with church members for several months.
The backlash revealed another truth. While Jim Crow could be quietly embarrassed, white supremacist violence remained ready to enforce its boundaries. Routté’s experiment may have exposed the system’s stupidity, but it also reminded the country that those invested in racial hierarchy would respond with terror when exposed.
Routté continued his ministry as pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in South Jamaica, Queens, the only congregation he led in New York. From this pulpit, he remained engaged in civil rights efforts and consistently addressed racial injustice within both the church and broader society.
Though never as famous as national civil rights leaders, his story belongs to a broader tradition of Black resistance that used intelligence, irony, and moral clarity to challenge white supremacy.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/07/17/332380449/how-turbans-helped-some-blacks-go-incognito-in-the-jim-crow-era
https://www.nytimes.com/1947/11/17/archives/queens-negro-pastor-in-a-turban-gets-white-service-in-deep-south.html
https://www.narratively.com/p/the-black-pastor-whose-turban-trick-exposed-american-racism?utm_source=chatgpt.com
