Wings Press

Studs Terkel tells us in his Foreword to the definitive Griffin Estate Edition of Black Like Me: "This is a contemporary book, you bet." Indeed, Black Like Me remains required reading in thousands of high schools and colleges for this very reason. Regardless of how much progress has been made in eliminating outright racism from American life, Black Like Me endures as a great human – and humanitarian – document. In our era, when "international" terrorism is most often defined in terms of a single ethnic designation and a single religion, we need to be reminded that America has been blinded by fear and racial intolerance before. As John Lennon wrote, "Living is easy with eyes closed." Black Like Me is the story of a man who opened his eyes, and helped an entire nation to do likewise.

About the Wings Press edition of Black Like Me

The Griffin Estate Edition of Black Like Me – the first hardcover version of this modern classic published since 1977 – appears in the 45th anniversary year of Griffin's 1959 experimental journey through the Deep South disguised as a Negro. This Wings Press hardcover edition provides new features not in other editions: Certain key passages deleted from Griffin's original typescript have been restored by Robert Bonazzi, editor of the Griffin Estate, and all errors from previous printings by other publishers have been corrected. This 2004 publication includes John Howard Griffin's 1976 Epilogue, and for the first time in any edition, Griffin's final word on racism, "Beyond Otherness," written in 1979, the year before his death. The edition also features a new Foreword by Studs Terkel, Griffin's longtime colleague and friend. Another first is the inclusion of Don Rutledge's historic photographs of John Howard Griffin disguised as a Negro in New Orleans, including images that have never been published. (The image used on the cover was discovered to exist only on a contact sheet.) The Afterword by Robert Bonazzi, composed especially for this edition, focuses on Griffin's evolving response to racism and race-relations – from the ethical vision of non-violence in the Civil Rights Movement to legally abolish segregation and regain voting rights during the 1960s, to Griffin becoming an advocate of the Black Power struggle to establish a new sense of African American self-determination and liberation in the 1970s.