[jofer]

As far as immigrants "whitening" their names in the early 20th century, it's pretty common, for whatever it's worth... My wife's last name is Gage, but her grandfather changed it from Gadzeki after he lost a local city council race for what he felt was his "damned Polish last name" (his words). This was in Detroit, and he worked for Ford, which at the time, had a fairly strong culture of "Americanizing" recent immigrants. There was a massive wave of anti immigrant sentiment in the 20's and 30's targeted at Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants, and it lingered for many decades afterwards.

Also, the first name bias is quite real. I dated a lady for most of my late teens - mid 20's named Ticia (pronounced Teecha, rather than Tisha). She's Ojibwe Chippewa, but this was rural TN and SC, so race is treated as a very binary black/white checkbox, and she falls into the "white" category. However, Ticia is a "black" name, for the most part. I lost count of the number of times I saw blatantly rude reactions when she introduced herself.