Black Like Me
John Howard Griffin, 1961
Penguin Group USA
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451234216
Summary
A dramatic true story about crossing the color line in the segregated Deep South.
In the Deep South of the 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross the color line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man.
His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity—that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 16, 1920
• Where—Dallas, Texas, USA
• Died—September 9, 1980
• Where—Fort Worth, Texas
• Awards—National Council of Negro Women Award; Pacem
in Terris Peace and Freedom Award (Catholic Church)
• Education—University of Poitiers (France); Ecole
de Medecine (Paris)
John Howard Griffin was an American journalist and author much of whose writing was about racial equality. He is best known for darkening his skin and journeying through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to experience segregation in the Deep South in 1959. He wrote about this experience in his 1961 book Black Like Me.
Griffin was born in Dallas, Texas to John Walter Griffin and Lena May Griffin, née YoungAwarded a scholarship, he studied French and literature at the University of Poitiers and medicine at the École de Médecine. At 19, he worked as a medic in the French Resistance army, where he was in charge of a psychiatric hospital. He also helped to smuggle Jewish children to safety and freedom.
He then served 39 months stationed in the South Pacific in the United States Army Air Corps. He spent a year in 1943-44 as the only white person on one of the Solomon Islands, where he was assigned to study the local culture; he even went so far as to marry. His biographer says he had to learn "the Floridian dialect," which would place his stay in the Florida or Nggela Islands, just north of Guadalcanal, where a significant campaign had just taken place in 1942-43. His 1956 novel Nuni is a semi-autobiographical work that draws heavily on his year "marooned" on the tropical island, and shows an interest in ethnography that he followed more fully in Black Like Me.
Later in his service, he was decorated for bravery. As a result of an accident during his service in the United States Air Force, he went blind; during this decade of darkness from 1947 to 1957 he wrote. He returned to Texas and taught piano, marrying one of his pupils. He later regained his vision, becoming an accomplished photographic artist. His experiences in losing and regaining sight have been posthumously published as Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision.
Griffin converted to Catholicism in 1952 and became a Third Order Carmelite. He was also a lifelong Democrat.
In the fall of 1959, Griffin determined to investigate the plight of African-Americans in the South firsthand. He consulted a New Orleans dermatologist, who prescribed a course of drugs, sunlamp treatments, and skin creams. Griffin also shaved his head so as not to reveal his straight hair. He spent several weeks as a black man in New Orleans and parts of Mississippi (with side trips to Alabama and Georgia) traveling mainly by bus and hitch-hiking.
His resultant memoir, Black Like Me, became a best seller in 1961. The book described in detail the problems a black man encountered in the South meeting simple needs such as finding food, shelter, and toilet facilities. Griffin also described the hatred he often felt from white people he encountered in his daily life—shop clerks, ticket sellers, bus drivers, et al. Griffin was particularly shocked by the extent to which white men displayed curiosity about his sexual life. The tale was tempered with some anecdotes of whites who were relatively friendly and helpful.
After the publication of Black Like Me, Griffin became a national celebrity for a time. In a 1975 essay included in later editions of the book, Griffin described the hostility and threats to himself and his family which emerged in his Texas hometown. He eventually was forced to move out of America and went to Mexico.
Throughout his life, Griffin lectured and wrote on race relations and social justice. Griffin was awarded the Pacem in Terris Award, named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that calls upon all people of good will to secure peace among all nations. Pacem in Terris is Latin for "Peace on Earth."
In later years, Griffin focused much of his work on researching his friend Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk and spiritual writer whom he first met in 1962. Griffin was the original choice by Merton's estate to write the authorized biography of Merton. While Griffin's health prevented him from completing this project, his more finished portion of the biography, on Merton's later years, was posthumously published in 1983 as Follow the Ecstasy: Thomas Merton, the Hermitage Years, 1965-1968.
Griffin died on September 9, 1980 at age 60 from complications due to diabetes.
It has been erroneously claimed that the large doses of Oxsoralen Griffin used in 1959 eventually led to his death from (the claim asserts) skin cancer. However, Griffin never had skin cancer; the only negative symptoms he suffered because of the drug were temporary and minor. The worst, arguably, were fatigue and nausea. (From Wikipedia and the New York Times.)
Book Reviews
(Audio version.) Griffin's mid-century classic on race brilliantly withstands both the test of time and translation to audio format. Concerned by the lack of communication between the races and wondering what "adjustments and discriminations" he would face as a Negro in the Deep South, the late author, a journalist and self-described "specialist in race issues," left behind his privileged life as a Southern white man to step into the body of a stranger. In 1959, Griffin headed to New Orleans, darkened his skin and immersed himself in black society, then traveled to several states until he could no longer stand the racism, segregation and degrading living conditions. Griffin imparts the hopelessness and despair he felt while executing his social experiment, and professional narrator Childs renders this recounting even more immediate and emotional with his heartfelt delivery and skillful use of accents. The CD package includes an epilogue on social progress, written in 1976 by the author, making it suitable for both the classroom and for personal enlightenment.
Publishers Weekly
(Audio version.) In 1959, Griffin, a noted white journalist, decided to try an experiment. He felt that the only way to determine the truth about how African Americans were treated by whites, and to learn if there was discrimination, was to become one. After a series of medical treatments that darkened his skin, he began his travels in the Deep South. Made up primarily of his journal entries during that time, Black Like Me, read by Ray Childs, details the experiences he had while passing for black. He finds that the people who saw him as white days earlier would not give him the time of day. He suffered even more as he rode buses in New Orleans, discovering how whites would no longer sit next to him. Listeners will be fascinated by his bus trip to Mississippi during which the driver would not let any of the African Americans off at a rest stop and how some of the passengers decided to deal with this slight. A fascinating view of life before the heyday of the Civil Rights movement, showing the difficulties of being black in America. For all libraries. —Danna Bell-Russel, Library of Congress
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Black Like Me:
1. Griffin became an international celebrity after publication of his article in Sepia magazine and later his book, Black Like Me. However, he also faced open hostility throughout the American South, including being burned in effigy in his hometown. What might today's reaction be if the book had just been published?
2. What motivates Griffin to change the color of his skin and take on the identify of a black man?
3. Talk about his reaction as Griffin looks in the mirror and first sees a black man peering back at him. He feels he has lost his identity. How would you feel if you changed the color of your skin? How does skin color affect identity? Is skin color a more powerful determinant than gender?
4. What do you consider as the most difficult experience that Griffin faced as a black man? What angered or depressed him—or you—the most?
5. How did you respond to the white men's attitude toward African-American sexuality? How does that stance dehumanize black men and women? And what does it say about white men who are so obsessed by the idea of black sexuality?
6. Griffin spends a day with his acquaintance P.D. East, and the two discuss racism and the law in the South. Talk about the ways in which prejudice was incorporated into the South's legal code.
7. How does the treatment Griffin receives at the hands of white people affect him? What does he notice about himself after a couple of weeks? Do you think his experience of racism was harder for Griffin because he was white...or easier because he was white?
8. Talk about Griffin's time in Montgomery, Alabama, and the young Martin Luther King, Jr., back then a still unknown figure outside the South.
9. What were some of the other positive things Griffin experienced? What about those who rose above the cruelty of hatred and intolerence? In what way did they offer hope?
10. The book was published in 1959. How far has the nation come in the past 50 years. Beyond the most obvious fact that the country elected an African-American president, to what extent—and how—does racism continue to show itself? What racial injustices, faced by Griffin in 1959, still exist today?
11. Follow-up to Question 10: What would Griffin would experience if he were to attempt his project today?
12. Even with his darkened skin, John Howard Griffin was still a white man. Was it possible for him to truly experience life as a black man? Is his book well-meaning but arrogant in its attempt to speak of another race's experiences? Or do you think Black Like me offers a critical perspective because it is the closest that any white person could ever come to experiencing—and thus understanding—racial intolerance?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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