Article Black Like Me
Summary: In 1959, a white man posed as a black man in the American Deep South for six weeks. The result was the bestselling book “Black Like Me.”
Posted by: Elliot Feldman
Black Like MeIn 1959, John Howard Griffin was a white native Texan novelist and journalist with a strange idea that he couldn’t get out of his head. … What if a white man became a “Negro” for six weeks, traveling through Deep South states including Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi? These were more than highly controversial thoughts fifty years ago.
His strange idea eventually led him to be hired to write a series of articles for “Sepia”, a popular monthly African-American magazine. Griffin’s next step was to strike a dangerous arrangement with a New Orleans dermatologist, who then agreed to help him create his “disguise.” The doctor gave Griffin treatments of oral pigmentation medication followed by repeated exposure to ultraviolet ray treatments. As a finishing touch, the author shaved his head, transforming himself (in his own words) into “a fierce, bald, very dark Negro.”
About John Howard Griffin
Born in Dallas, Texas to musician parents, John Howard Griffin trained to become a classical musicologist, studying in Paris with the likes of Nadia Boulanger. When the Nazis invaded France, 19-year-old Griffin went to work as a medic for the French Resistance, helping them evacuate Austrian Jews from Vichy France to safety.
When the U.S. entered the War, he joined the Army and became a decorated and wounded combat veteran.
For over ten years, as a result of a combat head injury, Griffin wound up going completely blind. In 1957, he regained his full sight in a miraculous recovery. During his years of blindness, John Howard Griffin had written several novels. In 1959, he decided to write “Black Like Me.”
“Black Like Me”
In a six-week period, John Howard Griffin traveled through four Deep South states as a white man, meeting friendly people in towns along the way. He then came back through the same places as a black man and received a completely different reaction from the same people that he had met as a white man. During his “social experiment”, for Griffin, it was the difficulty and small indignities of daily life as a black person that hurt worse than the few incidents of overt racism that he experience. It was the simple acts of finding a drink of water, a public restroom, or a place to stay that became the ultimate indignity for him.
In 1961, Griffin expanded his magazine story into a bestselling book. It was his book, “Black Like Me”, that created a nationwide controversy, resulting in a feature in “Time Magazine” and interviews with television’s Mike Wallace and Dave Garroway. The author became famous despite himself.
Aftermath
After his story became a nationwide sensation, he was subject to harsh criticism and protests that eventually ended up in the Texas town where he lived with his family. Griffin was burned in effigy there. This caused him to pull up stakes and move to Mexico with his family.
To this day, Griffin’s book and magazine articles read as powerful documents that once served to take the country’s temperature and provide a new empathy far beyond the black community.
John Howard Griffin died in Fort Worth, Texas in 1980.
Soul Sister
In 1968 author Grace Halsell decided to repeat Griffin’s experiment after reading his book. She contacted Griffin and he encouraged her to do it, arguing that it would be important to have the perspective of a black female’s experience to complement his own work.
Halsell pigmented her skin dark in order to pass as a black woman living in Harlem and Mississippi. She wrote about her experience in the best-selling book Soul Sister.
Halsell later lived among the Navajo, hiring herself out as a Navajo maid to a Southern California family. She wrote about this in her 1973 book Bessie Yellowhair. Some of her other experiences included living for months on a junk in Hong Kong and traveling 2000 miles by tug down the Amazon River.
References
- http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/GG/fgr99.html
- “John Howard Griffin”, Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post.