Mavi Boncuk | Entrance to American Consulate General in Constantinople c. 1919, when Frederick Thomas[1] went there to try to get a new passport (Carpenter Collection, Library of Congress) SOURCE
[1] Frederick Bruce Thomas (1872–1928)
Frederick Bruce Thomas was born in 1872 to former slaves and spent his youth on his family’s prosperous farm in Mississippi. However, a resentful, rich white planter's attempt to steal their land forced them to escape to Memphis. And when Frederick's father was brutally murdered by another black man, the family disintegrated. After leaving the South and working as a waiter and valet in Chicago and Brooklyn, Frederick went to London in 1894, then traveled throughout Europe, and decided to go to Russia in 1899, which was highly unusual for a black American at the time. Frederick found no color line in Russia and made Moscow his home.
During the next nineteen years he renamed himself “Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas,” married twice, acquired a mistress, took Russian citizenship, and by dint of his talents, hard work, charm, and guile became one of the city’s richest and most famous owners of variety theaters and restaurants. The Bolshevik Revolution ruined him and he barely escaped with his life and family to Turkey in 1919. Starting with just a handful of dollars out of the millions he had lost, Frederick made a second fortune in Constantinople by opening a series of celebrated nightclubs that introduced jazz to Turkey.
"To save himself, Thomas fled from Soviet Russia. In 1919, after surviving hair-raising perils, he managed to reach Constantinople with most of his family. Although he had lost all his wealth, within three months of arriving he opened an entertainment garden on the city’s outskirts. At first, debts almost sank him, but through perseverance, imagination, and guile he managed to prevail and quickly emerged as the city’s preeminent nightclub owner. He was also the first to import jazz to Turkey, and its popularity among the city’s natives and swarms of well-heeled tourists consolidated his success and made him rich once again.
However, after escaping from Russia, Thomas was never again free of the burden of race, and it would be his undoing. To the Turks his skin color was of no concern; the Ottoman Empire was racially heterogeneous and did not parse the world the way white America did. But Thomas could not avoid dealing with the diplomats in the American Consulate General in Constantinople, or with their racist superiors in the State Department. When he most needed their help, they refused to recognize him as an American and to give him legal protection. Abandoned by the United States, and caught between the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic and his own extravagance, he fell on hard times, was thrown into debtor's prison, and died in Constantinople in 1928. At the beginning of the twentieth century, white America had no interest in celebrating black achievement. This is the primary reason why Frederick Bruce Thomas is now virtually forgotten. Very few American newspapers noticed his passing. One that did was The New York Times, and on July 8, 1928, in an article about Constantinople referred to him as the city’s late “Sultan of Jazz.” - Source
See:The Black Russian