Black Like Me
Authors: John Howard Griffin
S
tuds 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
is 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.
K
nown primarily
as the author of the modern classic.
Black Like Me
, John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) was a true Renaissance man. He fought in the French Resistance and served in the Army-Air Force in the South Pacific during World War II. Griffin became an acclaimed novelist and essayist, a remarkable portrait photographer and a musicologist recognized as an expert on Gregorian Chant.
On October 28, 1959, John Howard Griffin dyed himself black and began an odyssey of discover] through the segregated Deep South. The result was
Black Like Me
. arguably the single most important documentation of 20th century American racism ever written.
Because of Black Like Me, Ggiffin was personally vilified, hanged in effigy in his hometown, thrreatened with deatd, and – asl late as 1975 – severely beaten by the KKK. Griffin’s courageous act and the book it generated earned him international respect as ha human rights activist. griffin worked with Martin Luther King, Dick Gregory, Saul Alinsky, and NAACP Director Roy Wilkins throughout the Civil Rights era. He taught at the University of peace with Nobel Peace Laureate Father Dominique Pire, and delivered more than a thousand lectures in Europe, Canada and the US.
Earlier, during a decade of blindness (1947-1957), Griffin wrote nobels. his 1952 bestseller,
The Devil Rides Outside
, was a test case in a controversial trial before the US Supreme Court that resulted in a landmark decision against censorship. Two of his most important books have been published posthumously as part of a growing revival of interest in griffin’ work:
Street of the Seven Angels
, a satiric anti-censorship movel, and
Scatterd Shadown: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision
.
Works by John Howard Griffin
The Devil Rides Outside
(1952, Ebook 2010)
Nuni
(1956, Ebook 2010)
Land of the High Sky
(1959)
Black Like Me
(1961)
The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition (2004)
The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition, Revised with Index (2006)
Ebook edition (2010)
50th Anniversary Edition (2011)
The John Howard Griffin Reader
(1968)
The Church and the Black Man
(1969)
A Hidden Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton
(1970)
Twelve Photographic Portraits
(1973)
Jacques Maritain: Homage in Words and Pictures
(1974)
A Time to Be Human
(1977)
The Hermitage Journals
(1981)
Follow the Ecstasy: Thomas Merton’s Hermitage Years
(1983, 1993, Ebook 2010)
Pilgrimage
(1985)
Encounters with the Other
(1997)
Street of the Seven Angels
(2003, Ebook 2010)
Available Light: Exile in Mexico
(2008, Ebook 2010
Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision
(2004, Ebook 2010)
“I wet my sponge, poured dye on it, and touched up the corners of my mouth and lips, which were always difficult spots.”
-
Black Like Me
, page 119
This photograph of Griffin applying the “dye” to his face is here published for the first time. This and other historic photographs included in this edition of
Black Like Me
were taken by Don Rutledge in 1959 in New Orleans.
Black Like Me
© 1960, 1961, 1977 by John Howard Griffin.
Portions first appeared in
Sepia
magazine © 1960 by Good Publishing Co. Copyright renewed 1989 by Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi, Susan Griffin-Campbell, John H. Griffin, Jr., Gregory P. Griffin and Amanda Griffin-Fenton.
Black Like Me:
The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition © 2004 by The Estate of John Howard Griffin and Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi. “Beyond
Otherness
” by John Howard Griffin first appeared in
Encounters with the Other
(Latitudes Press) © 1997 by Robert Bonazzi. Foreword © 2004 by Studs Terkel. Afterword © 2004 by Robert Bonazzi. Photographs © 2004 by Don Rutledge.
Black Like Me:
The Definitive Griffin Estate E-Book Edition © 2010 by The Estate of John Howard Griffin and Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi. All rights reserved.
First Wings Press Edition, 2004
Second Wings Press Edition, with Index, 2006
ISBN: 0-930324-72-2 (trade hardcover edition) 978-0-930324-72-8
ISBN: 0-930324-73-0 (reinforced library binding) 978-0-930324-73-5
Wings Press Ebook Editions, 2010:
ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-108-5 • Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-109-2
Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-110-8
Except for fair use in reviews and/or scholarly considerations, no portion of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of Robert Bonazzi, representing the Estate of John Howard Griffin and Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi
.
Wings Press
627 E. Guenther • San Antonio, Texas 78210
Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805 •
www.wingspress.com
Distributed by Independent Publishers Group •
www.ipgbook.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Griffin, John Howard, 1920 − 1980
Black like me : the definitive Griffin estate edition, corrected from original manuscripts / John Howard Griffin; with a foreword by Studs Terkel; historic photographs by Don Rutledge; and an afterword by Robert Bonazzi.– 1st Wings Press ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-930324-72-2 / 978-0-930324-72-8 (alk. paper) – ISBN
0-930324-73-0 / 978-0-930324-73-5 (reinforced lib. bdg. : alk. paper)
1. African Americans-Southern States-Social conditions. 2. Southern States-Race relations. 3. Griffin, John Howard, 1920- 1980. 4. Texas-Biography. I. Title.
E185.61.G8 2006
975’.00496073–dc22
2004001549
In Memory of
John Howard Griffin (1920-1980)
and
Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi (1935-2000)
R
eading
Black Like Me
45 years after it originally appeared is much like walking with a ghost. It is a journey through a haunted land with no cicerone to show you the way. Much has changed during those tumultuous years, especially in the South, and yet much has remained the prickly same. The black-white matter is still the Great American Obsession.
What is it like to be the
Other
? A few, very few, thoughtful heroic whites, through the four centuries since the arrival of the first slave ship at Charleston Harbor, have at one time or another considered the idea. It was one man who actually followed through. John Howard Griffin, a white Texan, thought the unthinkable and did the undoable: he became a black man.
Griffin, a student of theology and disciple of Jacques Maritain, a musicologist, photographer and a novelist, decided to become a Negro. (The phrase African-American had not yet enriched our vocabulary).
With the help of a dermatologist, he ingested pigment-changing medicines and subjected himself to intense ultra-violet rays. Though he, in the process, suffered considerable discomfort, he finally “passed.” To add the final touch, he shaved his head clean bald and had, indeed, become an approaching-middle-aged black man of some dignity. He was all set to wander across the Deep South, especially Mississippi. His book is in the form of a diary. The first entry: October 28, 1959. That was the day he became possessed by the challenge. The final one: December 15. That was the day he returned home to his family in Mansfield, Texas as a white husband and father.
What follows is an epilogue; a recounting of the firestorm that ensued with the publication of
Black Like Me
. He was celebrated, of course, in national journals as well as on TV and radio. The vilification came along with it. It was a matter of course. What mattered most, and still matters most, is the difficulty white Americans have in feeling what it is to be the
Other
.
A black woman I know speaks of “the feeling tone.” John Howard Griffin, in his perilous, humiliating, and at times hilarious, yet, strangely enough, hopeful adventure, captured “the feeling tone” as no white man I’ve ever known.
This is a contemporary book, you bet.
- Studs Terkel
Chicago, 2004
This may not be all of it. It may not cover all the questions, but it is what it is like to be a Negro in a land where we keep the Negro down.
Some whites will say this is not really it. They will say this is the white man’s experience as a Negro in the South, not the Negro’s.
But this is picayunish, and we no longer have time for that. We no longer have time to atomize principles and beg the question. We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.
The Negro. The South. These are the details. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared and the detested. I could have been a Jew in Germany, a Mexican in a number of states, or a member of any “inferior” group. Only the details would have differed. The story would be the same.
This began as a scientific research study of the Negro in the South, with careful compilation of data for analysis. But I filed the data, and here publish the journal of my own experience living as a Negro. I offer it in all its crudity and rawness. It traces the changes that occur to heart and body and intelligence when the so-called first-class citizen is cast on the junk heap of second-class citizenship.