Uncommon Vision: The Life and Times of John Howard Griffin by Morgan Atkinson , Published by Wings Press

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Uncommon Vision: The Life and Times of John Howard Griffin

by Morgan Atkinson

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Uncommon Vision: The Life and times of John Howard Griffin is Morgan Atkinson's documentary on the remarkable life of a son of the American South who became a citizen of the world and stirred the conscience of a nation.

Griffin is best known as the white man who disguised himself as a black man in 1959 and traveled through the heart of Dixie. From his experiences he wrote Black Like Me, a groundbreaking best seller that today stands as a testament to moral commitment and a document of an extraordinary event during the Civil Rights era.

Uncommon Vision focuses on Griffin's social activism, but also examines how a spiritual quest led him from a segregated Texas childhood to fighting with the French underground. This faith sustained him during a decade of blindness and inspired him during a prolific creative life as a writer and photographer.

It is an entertaining and edifying story. Studs Terkel, one of the great chroniclers of 20th century American culture and a frequent interviewer of Griffin, summed him up thus: "Griffin was one of the most remarkable people I have ever encountered. He was just one of those guys who comes along once or twice in a century and lifts the hearts of the rest of us."

The on-camera commentators for the documentary are: Mike Wallace, who interviewed Griffin on CBS Television in 1960; Dick Gregory, civil rights activist who lectured with Griffin and authored two best sellers on race relations during the 1960s; Jonathan Yardley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former book reviewer for the Washington Post, who wrote a stirring essay about Black Like Me; Donald Shriver, President Emeritus of the Union Theological Seminary; Jerry Harp, Lewis and Clarke scholar, who has written about Griffin's spirituality; and Robert Bonazzi, Executor of the Griffin Estate and author of Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me.

Reviews

A Prophet's Story Retold

Fort Worth Star-TelegramOct. 31, 2010
From Bob Ray Sanders' column in the [Fort Worth Star-Telegram]

Fifty years ago, a Mansfield man gathered up his family and fled to Mexico.
His actions and statements over the previous year had riled many people in the racially charged small town.
The nasty phone calls and threats had been coming for a while, but one morning in 1960 he was awakened by a Star-Telegram reporter who was amazed that the man didn't "sound too excited" or agitated.
"Why should I be?" the groggy man asked, according to the account in writer Robert Bonazzi's book, Man in the Mirror.
"You were hanged in effigy from the center red-light wire downtown on Main Street this morning," the reporter told him.
The dummy used in the hanging had its face painted half white and half black to depict the man they had come to despise -- a man who had become a hero to many in the Fort Worth area and around the country, but a disgrace to many of his fellow townspeople.
John Howard Griffin, a native of Dallas who grew up in Fort Worth, was white. And he had the audacity in 1959 to darken his skin and spend several weeks in the Deep South as a black man.
Some of his closest friends and family would not know what he did until his story was first told in a five-part series in Sepia magazine, a national publication headquartered in Fort Worth that rivaled Ebony. The series, titled "Journey into Shame," was an indictment of the Jim Crow South and the system of discrimination that denigrated an entire race of people.
Griffin would go on to tell his story to Mike Wallace on CBS and other programs, and he was in high demand on the lecture circuit.
For many of us in Texas and throughout the South who were told our destinies were to be determined by our skin color, Griffin was a prophet who had been sent to call the nation (and particularly the white race) to repentance.
The Sepia articles led to the publishing of the bestseller Black Like Me, which was later turned into a movie.
Ten years after Griffin made his famous journey, he received a letter from a young black college student about to enter his senior year. The student, preparing his senior research paper on "the Negro press" and Sepia magazine, had requested an interview with the author for his views on the black press and on George Levitan, his friend and publisher of Sepia who had financed the trip through the South.
Griffin wrote back to the student, explaining, "I wish I could answer in the kind of detail you deserve, but I am ill and also working in complete seclusion to complete a new book."
That student was me, one who was and is endeared to the man. I still have that letter, which I showed to Griffin's children and grandchildren last week.
Through Bonazzi's works and other material, I knew quite a bit about this writer, but it wasn't until I saw a new film on the man that I felt I really got to know him.
Uncommon Vision: The Life and Times of John Howard Griffin by filmmaker Morgan Atkinson premiered Thursday night before a standing-room-only crowd at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Griffin's family and some of his former neighbors were in the audience.
The film chronicles Griffin's life from his Fort Worth childhood through his high school and college days in France; his activity in the French underground to help Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis; his service in World War II and the war injuries that left him blind; the miraculous regaining of his sight 10 years later; and the years during and after Black Like Me.
Through this film, I saw a man even more ahead of his time than I had imagined. I saw more of his intellect, his cultural depth and a fierce fighter for freedom. I saw a human being with an infectious spirit, and one who most definitely had an "uncommon vision."
Next year marks the 50th anniversary of Black Like Me, an event that much of the world will celebrate. I wonder how we in Fort Worth, and especially Mansfield, will observe the occasion.
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Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.
Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/10/30/2588820/a-prophets-story-retold.html#ixzz143IofU6i

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