[fso301]

Well, a US baby couldn’t be African. But a parent could. I don’t have any examples, sorry. My point is that it would have been natural for some clerk to use “African” to try to confer respectability on a black-skinned foreign national.

[Genoa]

That qualifies as “white.”

[curiosity]

In point of fact, the father classified himself.

It seems pretty plausible to me that African man would prefer to classify himself as "African" than as "Negro," given that Pan-African nationalism was so much in vogue at the time.