Alvera Rita Kalina, (née Frederic, October 21, 1921 – April 5, 2014) was a multiracial American who passed as white.
[1] She is the subject of White Like Her: My Family's Story of Race and Racial Passing, written by her daughter, Gail Lukasik.
She was working as a server in a teashop at the time and moved north to Ohio four years later, married Harold Kalina,[3] a white man.
[5][6][7] In 1997, 2 years after the death of her father, Gail Lukasik confronted her mother with what her genealogy search had uncovered, namely that Alvera was listed as colored in the census and on her birth certificate, which had been confirmed by the State of Louisiana in a letter.
Or her fear of sunlight, and the obsessive neatness of her house, where you could eat off the floor, or the dramatic Sunday church entrances where they took the first pew and a neighbor royally derided them as 'the first family'.
Gail's story was chosen for a television episode that traced her genealogy from a free man of color, Leon Frederic, who served in the Louisiana Native Guards during the Civil War.