Wings Press

Critical Praise for Black Like Me (50th Anniversary Edition)

• Black Like Me is essential reading as a basic text for study of this great contemporary social problem. It is a social document of the first order, providing material absolutely unavailable elsewhere with such authenticity that it cannot be dismissed.

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• His new book may serve as a corrective to the blindness of many of his countrymen.

  — New York Herald Tribune

• With this book, John Howard Griffin easily takes rank as probably the country's most venturesome student of race relations. It is a piercing and memorable document.

  — Newsweek

• Black Like Me is a moving and troubling book written by an accomplished novelist. It is a scathing indictment of our society.

  – Saturday Review of Literature

  — Saturday Review of Literature

• A stinging indictment of thoughtless, needless inhumanity. No one can read it without suffering.

  — Dallas Morning News

• One of the deepest, most penetrating documents yet set down on the racial question.

  — Atlanta Journal Constitution

• Black Like Me is gentle in tone, but it is more powerful and compelling than a sociological report, more penetrating than most scientific studies. It has the ring of authenticity.

  — Detroit News

• This is the pilgrimage par excellence of our time; the story of an incarnation made by one man, in deep reverence for the Divine Humanity that is daily insulted, buffeted, scourged, beaten and bled in every black man whites insult. Mr. GriffinÕs heroic charity and courage are a glory for the church.

  — Commonwealth

• A shocker ... the report of a white man who darkened his skin and lived as a Negro in the South to see the racial problem at first hand. This book will generate emotion.

  — Publishers Weekly

• "This is the human story . . . a book about simple justice"

  This is a shocking book, growing from the shock experienced by a white man who had the courage to find out for himself what it was like to be treated as a Negro. This is the human story . . . a book about simple justice. It suggests that any white man who thinks the Negro in the South is secure and contented should try being one

  — St. Petersburg Times

• It is an appalling report of man's inhumanity – institutionalized and sactioned – to his fellow man. And, while it can only succeed in approximating the true horror of the Negro's situation, the book should be must reading for all whites and for those numerous Negroes who like to pretend all's right with the world

  — Negro Digest

Reviews

• John Howard Griffin Took Race All the Way to the Finish

  The Washington PostSaturday, March 17, 2007

  An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.

  In the fall of 1959 an obscure white journalist and novelist named John Howard Griffin, a native of Texas, went to a dermatologist in New Orleans with what can only be called an astonishing request: He wanted "to become a Negro." A man of conscience and religious conviction, he was deeply troubled by the racial situation in his native South. He was "haunted" by these questions: "If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South, what adjustments would he have to make? What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin color, something over which one has no control?"

  The dermatologist agreed to cooperate with Griffin's project, darkening his skin "with a medication taken orally, followed by exposure to ultraviolet rays." Griffin, who had arranged with the editors of Sepia, the prominent black magazine, to write about his experiences, was in a hurry to get started and asked for "accelerated treatments," which he soon supplemented with stain. He also shaved his head, "since I had no curl." He did not look in the mirror until the process was complete, and when he did, he saw "the face and shoulders of a stranger — a fierce, bald, very dark Negro." He was stunned:

  "The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. . . . I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin's past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness. . . . I had tampered with the mystery of existence and I had lost the sense of my own being. This is what devastated me. The Griffin that was had become invisible."

  Thus began Griffin's six-week odyssey through the South, a journey that took him from New Orleans to Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. In March of the next year Sepia published his story, and in 1961 an expanded version was published as a book, "Black Like Me." The cumulative effect of the magazine story, the book and all the attendant publicity — Griffin was interviewed by the television journalists Dave Garroway and Mike Wallace and featured in Time magazine — was astonishing. The book became a bestseller. It awoke significant numbers of white Americans to truths about discrimination of which they had been unaware or had denied.

  I was one of them. In 1961, I was 21 years old, newly graduated from Chapel Hill. I had written sympathetically about the emerging black protests for the student newspaper, but I was deeply ignorant about the truths of black life in America. That it took a white man to begin my awakening is, in hindsight, distressing, but Griffin's story managed to put me in a black man's shoes as nothing else had. (My first readings of James Baldwin's essays were still a couple of years in the future.) "Black Like Me" had a transforming effect on me, as apparently it did on innumerable others. That it has remained in print for more than four decades is testimony to its continuing influence, in great measure because it is taught in high schools and colleges.

  Read now, for the first time since 1961, "Black Like Me" has lost surprisingly little of its power. I am more conscious of Griffin's occasional lapses into clumsy prose and his inclination to mount a soapbox (especially in the Epilogue he wrote in the 1970s for a new edition), but the story itself remains powerful, revealing and moving. If it is indeed being widely read by young people, that is all to the good, for it should act as a corrective to the characteristic American indifference to history that has rendered too many youths, white and black alike, ill-informed about the conditions in which African Americans lived not so long ago and out of which the civil rights movement arose.

  John Howard Griffin was a remarkable, even extraordinary, man. Born in Dallas in 1920, he went to Europe at the age of 15 and trained "as a musicologist specializing in classical music, especially Gregorian chant," according to an online sketch by his widow. His tutors included Nadia Boulanger and Robert Casadesus. He worked for the French Resistance, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps and was wounded, went blind in 1946 yet wrote copiously — he published two novels — and converted to Catholicism. After inexplicably recovering his sight in 1957, he did journalism and published a couple of books of photographs. As a consequence of "Black Like Me," he received many awards before his death in 1980 of complications from diabetes, which he had suffered from his entire life.

  What remains most important about "Black Like Me" is the force of the shock Griffin felt when he learned, in the most intimate ways, what it was — and for many still is — like to be black in America. In 1959 virtually none of the rights and opportunities that whites took for granted were extended to blacks, so Griffin immediately discovered that "an important part of my daily life was spent searching for the basic things that all whites take for granted: a place to eat, or somewhere to find a drink of water, a rest room, somewhere to wash my hands. More than once I walked into drugstores where a Negro can buy cigarettes or anything else except soda fountain service." Invariably he was directed to "the nearest Negro caf? [which] is always far away, it seems."

  The book never answers a question that any reader is sure to ask: How was Griffin, with his Anglo features and Texas accent, able to be a convincing African American in the Deep South? At the advice of a black man whom he befriended soon after changing his skin color, he did shave the hair from his hands to improve the authenticity of his appearance, but would he not have looked simply like a dark-skinned Caucasian? The reader is justified in wondering how he got around this. Still, that's an essentially minor quibble, of the sort that slightly diminishes a book's credibility but doesn't really damage it.

  Griffin was never a victim of the violence to which Southern blacks routinely were subjected in those days, but he had his close calls, and when he got to Hattiesburg, a Mississippi town where racial tensions were especially high, he felt that he was "in hell," a place that "could be no more lonely or hopeless, no more agonizingly estranged from the world of order and harmony." Desperately, he secretively made his true self known to P.D. East, a courageous (white) newspaper editor who "continued stubbornly to preach justice" despite virulent hostility from the white community. East and his wife took Griffin in for a couple of rejuvenating nights, before he headed toward Mobile.

  He got there by hitchhiking, mostly with whites. Generally they were friendly, but almost all "showed morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the Negro, and all had, at base, the same stereotyped image of the Negro as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied." They assumed "that marital fidelity and sex as love's goal of union with the beloved object were exclusively the white man's property." One burly white man asked him if his wife "ever had it from a white man," and said: "We figure we're doing you people a favor to get some white blood in your kids." This "grotesque hypocrisy slapped me as it does all Negroes."

  When Griffin got to Mobile, he tried to find a job, but with no luck. One foreman told him: "We're getting you people weeded out from the better jobs at this plant. . . . Pretty soon we'll have it so the only jobs you can get here are the ones no white man would have." Things looked a bit better in Montgomery, where "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s influence, like an echo of Gandhi's, prevails," and in Atlanta, where, "though segregation and discrimination still prevail and still work a hardship, great strides have been made — strides that must give hope to every observer of the South."

  Overall, though, the portrait that Griffin paints of the South is gloomy. Everywhere he went, "the criterion is nothing but the color of skin. My experience proved that. [Whites] judged me by no other quality. My skin was dark. That was sufficient reason for them to deny me those rights and freedoms without which life loses its significance and becomes a matter of little more than animal survival." He became depressed, and his face lapsed into "the strained, disconsolate expression that is written on the countenance of so many Southern Negroes." He "decided to try to pass back into white society" and scrubbed off the stain; immediately "I was once more a first-class citizen." The knowledge gave him little joy.

  A few months later, as his story became public, he was hanged in effigy in the Texas town where he lived with his wife and four children. They moved to Mexico for a while, then to Fort Worth. For the rest of his life he was an outspoken advocate of civil rights who had, as much as or more than any other white person in the country, earned his stripes. His influence is felt to this day through this remarkable book.

• Black Like Me turns 50

  The Houston ChronicleOct. 2, 2011

  From [The Houston Chronicle]

  Reviewed by MAGGIE GALEHOUSE

  A solitary white man  a Texan  dyed his skin black and set off on a life-changing journey through the Deep South in 1959.

  Over several weeks, John Howard Griffin searched for work, made friends, suffered physical threats, endured harassment and sat in the back of the bus as a black man.

  On one bus ride, he half rose from his seat to offer it to a middle-aged white woman who looked tired. But the black passengers around him frowned their disapproval: "I realized that I was going 'against the race' and the subtle tug-of-war became instantly clear," Griffin writes. "If the whites would not sit with us, let them stand."

  In the age of reality TV, a white man posing as black might not seem that provocative. But in the early years of the civil-rights era, it was a blind leap into dangerous territory.

  Griffin, who was raised in Fort Worth, described his journey in Black Like Me (1961), a book that stands apart as a singular project on race. Wings Press in San Antonio has just published a 50th anniversary edition.

  "You can judge the book on its literary merit, but that's not how I judge it," says Bob Ray Sanders, 64, whose columns for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram often confront racial themes. "I judge it for its moral and historical significance, and the inspiration it gave to those of us still looking for hope in those days."

  Still taught in high schools across the country, the book jump-starts conversation and personal reflection about race.

  "My students were just awed by the fact that he (Griffin) was not allowed to use a bathroom," says Geneva Hargrove, a former high school English teacher who now directs federal and state programs at Anson Independent School District, near Abilene.

  "They already knew about sitting in the back of the bus. Lynching. Slavery. But it hit home for them when not only could he not find a job, but he wasnt allowed to use the same restroom as whites."

  Griffin changed the color of his skin to explore how differently he'd be treated, explains Robert Bonazzi, Griffin's longtime friend and biographer.

  "He had seen the suppression of the Jews in France during World War II, so he was sophisticated about certain things," Bonazzi says. "He assumed it would be a matter of inconvenience, but it turned out to be a different reality."

  Becoming black

  Griffin spoke with Sepia magazine about his plans to travel as a black man, and the magazine agreed to run a series of articles about his journey.

  Under a dermatologist's care, Griffin took the drug Oxsoralen to darken his skin, sat under a sunlamp, and ground stain into his flesh to even out the color. After several days, the 39-year-old set out on Nov. 7, 1959, for an unmapped adventure that would take him through Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia.

  "How did one start?" Griffin writes. "The night lay out there waiting. A thousand questions presented themselves. The strangeness of my situation struck me anew  I was a man born old at midnight into a new life. How does such a man act? Where does he go to find food, water, a bed?"

  For weeks, Griffin lived in the black sections of different cities, staying at black-only hotels, eating at cafes owned and run by blacks, traveling alongside black men and women.

  He was most anxious in Mississippi, where a recent trial had set both blacks and whites on edge. In a case where a black man was lynched and murdered, not only did jurors fail to indict the men accused, they also declined to review any of the evidence compiled against them. Griffin was so rattled one evening that he called a friend  a white newspaperman whose commitment to civil rights had made him persona non grata with much of the white community  and spent a few days at his home.

  After several days of hitchhiking and fielding shockingly intimate sexual questions from the curious white men who stopped to give him a lift, Griffin took shelter with a poor but generous black family. The children kissed him good night and he stretched out on the floor, unable to sleep: "I felt again the Negro children's soft lips against mine, so like the feel of my own children's good-night kisses. I saw again their large eyes, guileless, not yet aware that doors into wonderlands of security, opportunity and hope were closed to them."

  Before Black Like Me

  Griffin was born in Dallas and raised in Fort Worth, as Bonazzi notes in an afterword to the new edition of Black Like Me.

  Hungry for a better education, he responded to an ad for a private school in France and was accepted, sailing off to Europe in 1935 at age 15. There, he attended classes with African students.

  After studying literature and medicine at French universities, Griffin joined the underground resistance during the German occupation of World War II. He helped smuggle Jewish children out of Paris and into the country, where they would be sent to safety in England.

  In 1940 he returned to the States, enlisting in the Army Air Corps the following year. On the Pacific island of Morotai in 1945, an explosion gave him a concussion and impaired his vision. After returning to his family's farm in Mansfield, about 20 miles southeast of Fort Worth, he was declared legally blind.

  Over the next decade Griffin got married, started a family, and published a few books. In 1957, the writer began to see bits of red light. Over the course of several weeks, his eyesight returned.

  But the idea for Black Like Me came to him in 1956, when he still was blind.

  The Jewish Anti-Defamation League was traveling the country, surveying blacks and whites about school segregation. (Texas schools weren't desegregated until 1962.) Griffin sat on a panel in Mansfield and listened to concerns of various residents.

  "He was blind," Bonazzi says, "and he couldn't tell whether the speakers were black or white. They all had a Texas accent. He was really struck by this, that you could only tell the balance of a person by their heart and not the color of their skin."

  The aftermath

  In 1960, a few months after Griffin returned to Mansfield, news of his journey started to spread. Time Magazine wrote a story about him and Mike Wallace interviewed him on national TV.

  When Sepia magazine started publishing Griffin's articles, life in Mansfield became increasingly uncomfortable. Griffin's family received threats and once-cordial whites looked at Griffin with open hostility. One day, Griffin was hung in effigy in town. Eventually, the family was driven into exile in Mexico, where Griffin wrote Black Like Me in 1961. [1960. It was first published Nov. 1, 1961]

  Yet he never stopped speaking and writing about his extraordinary journey.

  In 1964, Griffin was standing by the side of the road in Mississippi with a flat tire.

  "He had been followed, as he and many civil rights workers often were in the South," Bonazzi explains. "He thought someone was going to help him. Instead, a group dragged him away and beat him with chains, left him for dead. It took him five months to recover. He was 44."

  A film of the book was made that same year - a bad film, according to Bonazzi - starring James Whitmore.

  Griffin spent his remaining years writing and lecturing. He died of a heart attack and complications from diabetes in 1980 at age 60. His four children still live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

  "In his lectures, he always said, 'I don't speak for black people, I speak for myself,'" notes Bonazzi, who married Griffin's widow, Elizabeth, in 1983.

  For Bonazzi, Griffin's most significant accomplishment was facing his own racism. In the book, when Griffin first sees his black face in the mirror, he is stunned: "In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger — a fierce, bald, very dark Negro — glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me. The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship."

  But Griffin faced his antipathy toward the man in the mirror.

  "He realized later that he was unbiased intellectually, but that emotionally, he was a racist," Bonazzi explains. "He wasn't afraid to talk about that. When he lectured, most of his audience was white and many of them were students. He said it was important if you grew up in the South to work to face this kind of racism. If you face it, he said, you're on your way to becoming unbiased, unprejudiced."

  For Sanders, the legacy of Black Like Me is not Griffin's individual experience, but that he was brave enough to share it with the rest of the world.

  "He was willing to come back, write it down, go on TV, go on speaking tours," Sanders says. "Here's a white man telling America at least some of the things I feel."

  _____
  Maggie Galehouse is book editor for the Houston Chronicle. Copyright 2011 Houston Chronicle.

• Fifty Years After Publication, 'Black Like Me' Still Resonates

  The Dallas Morning NewsFeb 10, 2012

  In November 1959 white Dallas native John Howard Griffin visited a New Orleans dermatologist and began the process of becoming a black man. His book about his experiences traveling the deep South in disguise, Black Like Me, sent shock waves through the country when it was first published a little more than 50 years ago.

  By the time the hysteria died down, Griffin had fled his Mansfield home after he was burned in effigy in downtown Fort Worth. And Black Like Me, which sold more than 5 million paperback copies in the 1960s alone and was recently republished by San Antonio's Wings Press, became a cultural touchstone for the era's race relations that has sent ripples across the decades. The book spawned a 1964 shock-value movie starring James Whitmore. Malcolm X and Alex Haley mentioned Griffin in 1965's Autobiography of Malcolm X. Griffin seemed to be taking the idea of walking in another man's shoes to a radical new interpretation. If you really want to know what it's like to be black, the book suggested, you must first become black.

  The life of Griffin, who died in 1980, has been pored over by biographers including Robert Bonazzi (1997's Man in the Mirror, now an e-book from Wings Press) and Thomas Fensch (last year's The Man Who Changed His Skin, published by New Century). Black Like Me today reads like a cultural artifact, a mixture of naïve good intentions, bizarre anthropology and brave social experiment. . . . But if Black Like Me feels dated, it has also left a trail of parodies, distortions and dissections that speak to its cultural resonance, even in today's pop culture. The very brazenness of Griffin's journey has inspired tributes both incisive and embarrassing.

  In 1984, Eddie Murphy brought down the house with a short film on Saturday Night Live called White Like Me (still viewable on Hulu). Expounding on the tried and true idea that the races live in two Americas, Murphy looks into the camera and explains his plan to actually experience life as a white man. Moments later he emerges onto the New York streets, face heavy with prosthetic white makeup, rear end tight enough to squash a quarter. What ensues remains uproarious. Murphy tries to buy a newspaper, but the store clerk won't let him pay: Slowly I began to realize that when white people are alone, they give things to each other for free. Riding a city bus, he observes as the only other black rider exits and a rolling party bursts out. It's a barbed bit of comedy that works on multiple levels. Murphy is laughing at the idea of going undercover as a member of a different race, implicitly critiquing Griffin's mission. He's also turning the premise of Black Like Me on its head, turning himself into the other. Finally he's insisting that racism is no less prevalent in 1984 than in 1959. Playing in whiteface would become a specialty of Murphy's, a means of reclaiming the perversions of minstrelsy that dominated 19th- and early 20th-century popular entertainment.

  On the other side of the scale was the abomination of Soul Man (1986), a misconceived comedy that rubbed the ideals of Black Like Me in the mud of cheap gags. A hotshot college graduate (C. Thomas Howell) needs a minority scholarship to enter Harvard Law School. So he pulls a Griffin, pops some tanning pills and goes Ivy League as a Jheri-curled black man. At one point he even dons shades and waves his head back and forth, a la Stevie Wonder. Soul Man tries to cover its tracks with feeble attempts to mock racists along the way, but it still goes down like a Reagan-era minstrel show.

  To say Black Like Me is dated is not to diminish Griffin's conviction or the impact he had on his readers. A man of deep conscience with a remarkable story of his own— Griffin assisted the French resistance, studied Gregorian chant with Benedictine monks and went blind for 10 years after combat in the South Pacific—he undertook a dangerous experiment for all of the right reasons. . . . Despite its relevance to current pop culture, Black Like Me isn't timeless in the sense of classic African-American literature— Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, say, or even Claude Brown's autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land. Griffin was the first to admit that, regardless of the dangers he faced as a black man in the South, he was but a tourist. He deserves credit for exploring the unknowable, but he also had the luxury of coming back, which he did after six weeks. But Griffin's journey still strikes a sensitive nerve. America's racial divide, then and now, is a chasm bridgeable only by empathy. Griffin talked the talk. He also found a way, if only temporarily, to walk the walk.

  Copyright 2012, Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News