Was Malinda Borden, a black woman, on Titanic?

In this post, I will be looking at the story of Malinda Borden, a black passenger claimed to have died on the Titanic, and the various claims within the story. The standard response from many Titanic enthusiasts and historians is to just brush this off with “hoax” or “not true.” That’s not really good enough. When I heard about this, I wanted to dig as deep as I could to see what I could find. The short answer is: The story is not true, it’s entirely fabricated. For the reasons why, and in-depth analysis for the claims, please continue reading. If there are any updates, I will add them to the end of this post as they come.

This is a long post, so I’m putting most of it under a cut. Given the nature of the story, its claims, and the sensitive issues it involves, it may be triggering. Continue at your own discretion. With that in mind…

This post has been making the rounds on Facebook lately. For those who don’t know the Titanic story beyond what they remember from the movie, it might seem plausible, but is it true? What’s the full story? Where did it come from? What’s the evidence? Let’s jump down the rabbit hole!

The story in its above form is the most popular version with 43,000 shares on Facebook, and it’s been shared and tweeted in plenty of other places. Snopes debunked it, but they didn’t really look into the story very far. When you dig deeper, you’ll find the story seems to have its roots in a series of posts on Facebook made by someone named Helen Griffin in early 2016. She claimed to be a descendant of Malinda Borden, that this story was passed to her via her grandfather, and that she has a letter telling the story from a black survivor. Griffin posted versions of the story in various places, and one version was featured on a black culture Facebook page:

There’s a lot to unpack there, but there are a number of problems that can be pointed out with the main claims, your standard debunking, including:

There’s no record or account of a Malinda Borden being on Titanic beyond these Facebook posts, in any capacity, on any list, and no body of a black woman was ever found or documented. That doesn’t prove she wasn’t there, necessarily, but all we have to go by are the claims themselves.

The lifeboats were not segregated by race. There is no record at all of that being a policy. In fact, people of color did get into or were rescued by lifeboats, primarily the two half-black children of the one black man who was on Titanic, a Japanese man who jumped into a boat, and six third class Chinese men.

There is nothing to indicate any number of black crew anywhere, in any list, manifest, name, photo, reports, or testimony, nor is there anything in records, plans, or testimony to indicate the presence of a “negro cabin” for black crew. Nor is there evidence for any substantial number of black servants or passengers. Titanic’s manifests have been poured over many times since the disaster, every name studied, every background looked into, and only one black man (along with his two half black children and white wife) have thus far been proven to be on board.



There’s no evidence that black crew would have only been listed on post-sinking lost property lists. Any people on board had to be rigorously documented, be they passengers, servants, or crew. The laws at the time were very strict about this, and the White Star Line and immigration authorities took the careful documenting of all people on board ships very seriously as an issue of health. On top of that, nobody has ever found anything listed on post-sinking claims for lost property (or in any cargo manifest) that could be described as a human being.

While people of color on board would have certainly experienced some level of prejudice, the idea that black crew or passengers were tied to heavy objects and thrown overboard is pure absurdity. Nowhere is anything like that ever mentioned anywhere, by anybody, at any time since the sinking beyond the few Facebook comments made by this one person.

The story has its issues, but that’s not even all of it. The supposed source of the story, the long version as detailed in the letter Griffin claims to have, is most telling about the story’s legitimacy (or lack thereof) because it contains the most claims and details, and if there’s one thing that’ll kill a bad fake story right quick fast in a hurry, it’s detail. The letter contradicts known, proven facts about what happened aboard Titanic, and makes some rather absurd claims. Here is the letter as posted by Griffin in 2016:

The Titaniacs reading this might notice a couple issues right away, but for the uninitiated, here are the things that stand out the most as being historically and factually problematic:

It claims Borden was a nurse. If she’s supposed to be part of the crew, that doesn’t work. Titanic didn’t have any nurses, be they men, women, black or white. There were only two surgeons and a male hospital steward, and their cabins/bunks are accounted for on plans of the ship.

Titanic had six lookouts, all of whom survived to tell their stories. The lookouts worked on strictly scheduled shifts, with none allowing for additional unlisted lookouts. None were black, none were women. In fact, women were generally barred from taking such positions, so even if black people were barred as well, they still wouldn’t let a woman do the job. Of course, if you claim there was a segment of secret unlisted crew who wouldn’t appear on any manifest and who have been hidden from history, I guess you can claim anybody was a lookout, eh?

The letter asserts that only white immigrants and Americans were allowed to leave the lower decks. This is not entirely true, as there were quite a few non-white passengers, especially women, who quite easily made it to the upper decks, although some - along with white passengers - did run into issues with less-bright crewmen and crew who told them to go back below decks in an attempt to keep some semblance of calm (or perhaps because they were racist, who knows).

It also propagates the claim of gates below decks used to keep passengers down. This is mostly a fiction of the 1997 film. While a few Bostwick gates and a couple other types of barriers were used to close off crew areas and separate alternating areas of the classes, there were no gates or barriers preventing people from going up on deck from their respective classes, and some of the below decks access points were even open. The only issues with gates were outside, up on the decks of the ship, far from the lower decks, which were waist-high gates to divide the outside promenades into classes. If there were any issues with gates, it would be there, out in the open with lots of witnesses. Funny, no survivor ever mentioned people being gunned down at the gates.

“A big fat white crew member” - No comment.



What would a crew member be doing with his wife on board? Nothing like that has ever been documented, which you’d expect even in this story since they’re white.



Additionally, there’s no account of anybody ever being in labor or giving birth on the Titanic at any point, least of all during the sinking.



“White female” - Yes, exactly how people talked.



I don’t know how much plastic was on the Titanic or how many poor crew women would have had bras, but plastic and mass-produced, cheap bras were quite new at the time, especially the bras, so that is a very odd line given the context.



I already addressed the black people being tossed overboard, but that absurdity of that line just needs to be pointed out again.



Many hours…” - They’d likely be dead after only a few dozen minutes in the freezing water. A few did survive longer, including one man who may have been more or less in the water for a couple hours, but that was rare.



The boats did not refuse to pick up non-white people. There were very few picked up from the water in the first place, but one of the last ones to be recovered alive from the water was a Chinese man. There are no accounts of the boats refusing to pick up or beat back people who were black after the sinking.



The letter claims one black man flipped an entire lifeboat full of people over, drowning everybody on board while the man survived. Meanwhile, back here in reality, Titanic had 20 lifeboats, all of which were accounted for, with all of them having passengers who survivived. Only one boat ever capsized, and that happened when it was pushed off the roof of the officers’ quarters. It still floated and a number of people found refuge on the overturned lifeboat.



10 hours in the sub-freezing water without dying of hypothermia? And I’m the reincarnation of Titanic’s center anchor.



A homemade lifeboat? What the…



The very existence of the letter itself is problematic. Grammar, for one thing. The author’s posts, in general, have the same kind of bad grammar, spelling, caps, etc., so one might assert it just carried over in the transcription. But then what people in 1912 talked like that? It honestly sounds like something a modern person just made up based on some stuff they remembered from the film and details they pulled out of their rear. Grammar aside, is there a physical letter? If it’s real, there would be a physical letter she transcribed from. Why not show the letter? Even bad fakes in the past have been physical letters you could look at, with effort taken to look old. They didn’t just make a badly-written post on Facebook. Has it been studied by experts, verified? (No letter was ever shown as far as I can tell, just this text in a Facebook post.)

The photo posted with the “letter” is also questionable. It’s a picture of a picture, ensuring that no reverse image search can pull up anything. Doing such a search pulls up no previous examples of the photo, and searching with “Titanic” shows only two links where the story is repeated. No other versions have surfaced so far. The name is a mystery, too. One person claimed this as proof:

But if you go back through her lineage, there’s nothing to indicate anything more than that she was born in 1874 in a family from a series of marriages going back to 1770s Virginia. The family’s probably not even African American. She wasn’t the only Malinda Borden, either. Another post from Griffin suggests “Malinda Mary Borden” as the full name, for which you’ll find the following page:

Funny, they don’t seem to have died in the Atlantic ocean in 1912, but in Alabama in 1930. Regardless, without more information on the first Borden, it just doesn’t prove anything.

One of the main claims of the story, and one of its biggest problems, is that there was a shadow crew of all-black people on board Titanic, kept off manifests and listed only as property, housed in segregated cabins. The claim is further detailed in the below comment left by Griffin on a Titanic blog:

The issue here is that we have extensive, detailed lists of every single crewmember aboard Titanic. Historians have spent decades going over the manifests, of people or otherwise, compiling lists, removing people who were proven not to be on board, adding people who were, combing through cemeteries, recovery and death records, records of recovered bodies, finding people’s original names, their families, comparing with accounts and finding records of all sorts. At the same time, we’ve also compiled detailed, well-researched deck plans of Titanic and her identical sister ship, Olympic, so we also know what parts of the ship housed what classes of people and crew, and how many of each type of crew were in the various crew dormitories. When you compare the capacities for the lowest and mid-level boiler and engine room crew with the manifests, you get the following:

161 firemen capacity - 161 on manifest

72 trimmers capacity - 73 on manifest

34 greasers capacity - 33 on manifest

15 leading firemen capacity - 13 on manifest

Doing the same with all other categories of crew on the manifest will give similar results. Nearly every alotted crew bunk is taken, and ever spot on the manifest has a name, and each name has been researched over the decades. None of the listed boiler room crews are known to be black. They were called the “Black Gang,” but that was due to their tendency to get covered in coal dust.

The claim, of course, is that black crew were unlisted except on manifests of lost property, but that’s still a problem. The spaces allotted for the crew were full when accounting for everybody on the manifest. Where would this extra crew stay? The claim is there was a segregated cabin, but nothing like that has ever been found on any plan, in any record, in any testimony, by any researcher. They wouldn’t be kept in 1st class, or 2nd class, or in aft 3rd class (where single women and families were kept apart from single men). That leaves forward 3rd class. Would the White Star Line really house whole teams of black-only stokers they didn’t need in facilities that were generally nicer than those for the rest of the stokers and adjacent to the rest of 3rd class, taking up cabins from paying passengers for the highly lucrative immigrant routes at the time? The stokers worked in specific shifts, distributed across the boiler rooms so all the furnaces could be serviced, with trimmers moving coal about. They didn’t need an extra all-black cache of super secret unlisted stokers.

But this all leaves an important question: What IS the actual evidence for this story?

Nothing is offered by Griffin beyond the Facebook posts the story comes from and the occasional comment repeating the story. The supposed letter is never shown. The photo isn’t elaborated on. No corroborating details are given about Malinda Borden’s life, nor about the other people mentioned in the letter.

The most you get from its believers is “Google it.” I did just that. With a Google search for “Malinda Borden Titanic”, I got 5 pages of results. Only the first page or so had relevant results. Of those, most were reposts or links to the story. Then there’s the Snopes page debunking it, and a few pages linking to the Snopes page. Finally, there are a couple of original posts of the story and one or two comments from the author. All results point to short versions of the story. To find the full letter, you have to look through Griffin’s Facebook page going back to 2016. There, nestled among hundreds of repeated posts about politics, punctuated by many graphic, horrific photos of lynching victims every few posts, you’ll eventually find the original posts for this story and the text letter.

Beyond that and what I’ve shown here? Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Titanic has also been intensely studied since the disaster. It’s quite literally one of the most written-about subjects in modern history. Thousands of historians, authors, and enthusiasts from all walks of life, races, classes, and political affiliations have studied Titanic and written about it. Every aspect of Titanic has been studied front to back, left and right, up and down. Every minute of the sinking has been scrutinized, every word of every survivor account from both inquiries and countless interviews and news pieces analyzed, every detail carefully pieced together. Nowhere is there a gap or an anomaly that would point to the sort of hidden history this story claims exists.

It’s also important to remember that Titanic wasn’t an isolated thing. Stories about Titanic are often larger than life, as if it was a singular, special thing. But it was just a ship that met an unfortunate end. It had an identical sister ship at the time, as well as one that would follow later. The White Star Line had dozens of ships around the world. There were many shipping lines in Britain, Ireland, America, Germany, France, and more. If the policies hinted at in this story were real, we wouldn’t just have to look at Titanic. Olympic sailed until the 1930s and for almost year before Titanic, you’d think there would be something somewhere by now about the secret all-black groups of stokers in the boiler rooms, or the mysterious, unlisted black cooks, stewards, nurses, etc.



This is all to say that, if this story were true, SOMETHING of that would have been discovered in the last 108 years. Some historian would have uncovered this story, or hints of the details told within. And not everyone would sit on that. Some historians would love to overturn what we think we know about history, and something like this would revolutionize and overturn our understanding of the Titanic story. Instead, the only evidence for this story is the story itself as told in a Facebook post from 2016; poorly-written, full of holes, and utterly unconvincing and unsupported. The only thing that props it up is its own vaguery and reliance on conspiratorial unfalsifiability.

In order to believe this story, you have to not only go against a century of some of the most rigorous research and a massive body of evidence, you also have to believe that literally everybody involved in Titanic’s story - every surviving crewmember, every passenger, every builder and White Star Line official, everybody from that time, until the death of the very last survivor in 2010 - and literally everybody involved in Titanic research and publication of any kind in the last 108 years - from Walter Lord to James Cameron and everybody between - is in on a grand, far-reaching conspiracy of coverups. Surely, the story’s apparent originator isn’t a conspiracy theori-



Oh… FUCKING. OOPS.

That’s right. The ROTHSCHILDS. An anti-semitic conspiracy theory you’ll often find favored by, you know, Nazis. The intentional sinking theory that’s only been debunked 44,765,334,896 times, the theory that’s supposedly been covered up by the Jews and the government. Oh and also that nonsense about the bunker fire taking down the whole ship, which was supposedly covered up by the WSL, now mixed in with a super secret unknown crew of black firefighters, whose story has supposedly been successfully covered up by all white people everywhere until one person on Facebook posted it. What’s next, Titanic was switched with Olympic which was then sunk for insurance money, then covered up by the 10,000 workers at Harland and Wolff and the WSL?

And like all conspiracy theories, this story is written in such a way as to make it both unprovable and unfalsifiable. “You can’t prove or disprove it because there are no records and all traces have been covered up.” Some eschew any sort of research in favor of simply believing based on what they feel, like this person:

In the age of Trump, fear, and increasing social and political tensions, in the world of bite-sized tweet-n-share social media, it’s a story that can easily gain traction despite there being no substantiated evidence at all for it. Its believers and defenders do the utmost minimal level of research (”I Googled it and found more than one link for the story!”), make assertions of coverups and use appeals to feelings and numerous fallacies while accusing the story’s skeptics of being racist, ignorant, or in on the grand conspiracy to keep these stories under wraps. (Some people who refute the story probably are racist and ignorant and haven’t offered much beyond “IT’S NOT TRUE DUMBASS!” But that has no bearing on the facts.) To the believers, none of this matters. If someone believes this, why does that matter, even if it’s not true?

Except it should matter. While people focus on this fake story, they miss out on the real stories of real people that were often overlooked until recent decades, stories that are supported by mountains of evidence and documentation.

Like the real story of Titanic’s Chinese passengers:

Eight of them boarded in 3rd class, six survived, with one of them being one of the last people rescued from the water. That rescue was even featured in a deleted scene from the 1997 film. “The Six” as they’re known fell into obscurity upon returning to China, with their story only recently being pieced together in a documentary slated to be released later in 2019.

Or the real story of Masabumi Hosono, the only Japanese man on Titanic:

He boarded in 2nd class and, after initially encountering a crewman who wouldn’t let him on deck because he was assumed to be 3rd class, eventually made it up on deck and into a lifeboat. He faced a great deal of shame upon returning to Japan.

Or the real story of Victor Giglio:

He was the half-Egyptian valet to Benjamin Guggenheim, staying with him in his 1st class stateroom, who “dressed in his best” along with Guggenheim, with both refusing a lifeboat in favor of “going down like gentlemen.”

Or the very real and tragic story of Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche:

Laroche was, as far as we know from nearly 108 years of research, the only black person on the Titanic when it sank, although you could say there were three if you count his two half-black daughters. He was an engineer from Haiti who studied in France and was heading back to Haiti in 2nd class along with his pregnant French wife and two daughters, seeking job opportunities that were denied him due to racism in France. They were originally supposed to travel on a French ship, but the line’s strict policies on children made them change their tickets for a voyage on Titanic. During the sinking, Laroche made sure his wife and children got into a lifeboat, but like many other men that night, he stepped back and stayed on board with the hope that rescue would come for the men and others who remained on the ship. It did not, and Laroche died in the sinking.

Titanic’s story isn’t free of prejudice. From antisemitism and anti-Italian sentiments among crew to racism and abuse directed at non-white and poor passengers to some extent or other, as well as the simple fact that almost certainly many on board were just plain racist (it was 1912, after all). Meanwhile, the stories of non-white passengers have indeed often been overlooked, sometimes due to the disinterest and racism of reporters at the time. But despite all that, these stories came out, and really were known to an extent all along, their evidence easy enough to find. That’s just not the case with the Malinda Borden story. The fact is, there were not many people of color on the Titanic, and even fewer black people. Making up and propagating likely false stories about there secretly being tons of black crew and passengers based on literally no evidence at all (the only evidence offered for this story is the story itself), I believe, takes away from the precious few stories that are true.

Nor is there nothing to be woke about. White people in positions of power and in general have covered up or ignored all sorts of racist acts and black history. Education has utterly failed in that regard. The lessons from black leaders have been diluted into soundbites white people can feel good about. COINTELPRO, Jim Crow and more on the government side, a long history of segregation and discrimination on the business side. There are many proven, documented, substantiated examples of genuine coverups and covert racism in government and business, disenfranchisement, and more. This story, however, is not one of them. Be woke, just don’t be so woke that you fall out of the bed, hit your head on the nightstand, and pass out again.



You don’t have to accept or believe any of this, though. Few of those faced with refutations of the story did, appealing to attacks and fallacious arguments instead. A Titanic researcher friend of mine was told to go “jack off to a Trump poster” for doubting this story. Do with this (and that) what you will.

UPDATE 1:

In the months since posting this, there definitely has not been anything to prove anything with this story. In fact, much of the “evidence” I covered here no longer exists. The Facebook page of Helen Griffin no longer exists and their posts are gone, and it’s possible some other posts about this vanished as well. I was going to add something about how you can do your own research on this if you feel it necessary, but that’s apparently impossible now. All that’s left of this story on social media now are the various reposts of the short summaries of the main claim. This Tumblr post, and possibly a few buried comments on one of the Facebook posts linked here, are the only places you’ll likely be able to find the full version of the story that sparked these claims. Of course, the original content may be gone, but the story they spawned will no doubt continue to be spread.