On November 13, 1924, the first public announcements of white scion Leonard Kip Rhinelander's secret marriage to a working-class "colored" woman, Alice Jones, exploded across the front pages of New York newspapers. Although Rhinelander, a wealthy white socialite, ignored family orders and stayed with his wife through the first week or so of the scandal, few were surprised when he ultimately left her and filed an annulment suit. While New York did not outlaw interracial marriages, Leonard's suit reflected the extent of public sentiment against such marriages. Claiming he had not known Alice was black and would not have married her if he had, Leonard, acutely aware of his class station, nonetheless based his request to dissolve the marriage on prohibitions against interracial unions. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that the jury of twelve white married men refused the Rhinelander heir his annulment and upheld the marriage, thereby accepting Alice's version of events and actions.The "Rhinelander Case" both depended on and challenged contemporary American assumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality. The nature of these beliefs and the depths of their acceptance and contention were manifested in the extensive and varied national media coverage of the young couple's marriage, separation, annulment trial, appeals, countersuits, and eventual divorce settlement in 1930. In particular, the arguments and evidence presented by both sides at the sensational 1925 annulment trial offer a unique opportunity to examine multiple American reactions to and understandings of the race and class positions of Alice and Leonard. In this article we explore and explain the tremendous amount of interest in the case and its main players, especially Alice. As a working-class black woman, Alice found herself subjected to stereotyped class and race images, but she also generated significant sympathy and support from the New York media and public-both white and black. We argue that this occurred in part because Alice and her family fit a counternarrative of respectability, turning on the rags-to-riches trope popularized in the Horatio Alger and Cinderella stories. As such, the lens of legal and media analysis often shifted focus, gliding from a social interpretation to one that emphasized the naturalized character of race and class. This story, therefore, highlights the critical importance of looking at the relational nature of social relations in racially stratified societies.Leonard and Alice Rhinelander came of age at a time when hierarchies of race, wealth, and occupation quite overtly structured oppor-