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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBlack Like Me, 50 Years Later
Last edited Sun Mar 2, 2014, 03:07 AM - Edit history (1)
John Howard Griffin gave readers an unflinching view of the Jim Crow South. How has his book held up?
By Bruce Watson
Smithsonian Magazine
John Howard Griffin, left in New Orleans in 1959, asked what "adjustments" a white man would have to make if he were black. (Don Rutledge)
John Howard Griffin had embarked on a journey unlike any other. Many black authors had written about the hardship of living in the Jim Crow South. A few white writers had argued for integration. But Griffin, a novelist of extraordinary empathy rooted in his Catholic faith, had devised a daring experiment. To comprehend the lives of black people, he had darkened his skin to become black. As the civil rights movement tested various forms of civil disobedience, Griffin began a human odyssey through the South, from New Orleans to Atlanta.
snip
Black Like Me disabused the idea that minorities were acting out of paranoia, says Gerald Early, a black scholar at Washington University and editor of Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation. There was this idea that black people said certain things about racism, and one rather expected them to say these things. Griffin revealed that what they were saying was true. It took someone from outside coming in to do that. And what he went through gave the book a remarkable sincerity.
snip
Across the South in the summer of 1959, drinking fountains, restaurants and lunch counters still carried signs reading, Whites Only. Most Americans saw civil rights as a Southern problem, but Griffins theological studies had convinced him that racism was a human problem. If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South, he wrote on the first page of Black Like Me, what adjustments would he have to make? Haunted by the idea, Griffin decided to cross the divide. The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us, he would write, was to become a Negro.
snip
As the civil rights movement accelerated, Griffin gave more than a thousand lectures and befriended black spokesmen ranging from Dick Gregory to Martin Luther King Jr. Notorious throughout the South, he was trailed by cops and targeted by Ku Klux Klansmen, who brutally beat him one night on a dark road in 1964, leaving him for dead. By the late 1960s, however, the civil rights movement and rioting in Northern cities highlighted the national scale of racial injustice and overshadowed Griffins experiment in the South. Black Like Me, said activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), is an excellent bookfor whites. Griffin agreed; he eventually curtailed his lecturing on the book, finding it absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-like-me-50-years-later-74543463/#ixzz2ulJcEouv
Hoyt
(54,770 posts)sheshe2
(86,903 posts)I think I need to read it again.
Hoyt
(54,770 posts)It is one of those books that is impossible to put down.
flamingdem
(39,840 posts)It was perfect for its time.
ananda
(30,393 posts)... Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me
This is a very fine book about Griffin and the whole experience.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51937.Man_in_the_Mirror?from_search=true
sheshe2
(86,903 posts)I'll check it out.
Sheldon Cooper
(3,724 posts)has decided that racism is over. So, let's all give thanks.
lunasun
(21,646 posts)who didn't believe it back then will
now say that it is gone and not now that was the past
ugh.
Sheldon Cooper
(3,724 posts)Notice she gave it two out of five stars.
Cindy's review Apr 29, 09
2 of 5 stars
Read in February, 2009
Couldn't find the exact cover of the one that I read. My copy is very old and very dogeared. Looks like more people have it on thier to-read shelves than have actually read it. In fact it is an old paperback with the actual price of 60 cents as selling price. I have a hard time seeing skin color on people. I know that prejudice is really felt by people, especially in the era of this book. But i just don't feel it.
Thankfully, she doesn't feel it.
lunasun
(21,646 posts)she is legion
Sheldon Cooper
(3,724 posts)Cindy's in charge. All hail!!
noiretextatique
(27,275 posts)northoftheborder
(7,602 posts)I would like to read the story about the book......
LiberalAndProud
(12,799 posts)Such an important book.
bettyellen
(47,209 posts)the first I ever read actually.
jwirr
(39,215 posts)and to this day I credit it with being one of the things that influenced my attitude toward the civil rights movement.
WinkyDink
(51,311 posts)Scuba
(53,475 posts)... is my recollection of a collective condemnation of racism in my rural Wisconsin community. I had never seen a black person, except on television. Almost everyone in my school was of Norwegian descent, blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned. There were no Hispanics, no Asians, no Blacks, no NA's. But every teacher - every adult I knew - said that racism was a bad thing, that everyone should be treated equally. I'm sure there were some who were secretly racist. But anyone showing it would have been condemned.
Today rural Wisconsin is much different. Blatant racism is commonplace, even among those who were taught the same lessons as I. After some thought, I've concluded that right-wing radio and Fox "News" are responsible for most of this.
Anyway, I appreciate Griffin and has book, and recommend it for those who have not read it.
freshwest
(53,661 posts)Last edited Sat Mar 1, 2014, 09:59 PM - Edit history (1)
KKK really hated to hear the truth come out.My family explained a great deal to me as I was growing up when I asked them. Some things I heard and didn't want to believe, but they assured me that the worst I heard was mild compared to the truth.
How anyone can deny the series of psychic earthquakes blacks have endured in this nation is hard for me to get a hold of even after all this time.
I could elaborate on that here, but I'll wait til I post a thread. I have a few planned.
sheshe2
(86,903 posts)Last edited Sun Mar 2, 2014, 03:05 AM - Edit history (1)
UR welcome freshwest.
I look forward to your OP's.
Solly Mack
(92,299 posts)Mr.Bill
(24,708 posts)Incredible book.
madamesilverspurs
(16,007 posts)I read Black Like Me and The Diary of Anne Frank within a few months of each other.
Eye-opening. Also heart-opening.
sheshe2
(86,903 posts)PCIntern
(26,736 posts)he was already ill.
seabeyond
(110,159 posts)advanced reader and my other son read it about 10'ish. an excellent book. thanks for the OP.
sheshe2
(86,903 posts)Yup, stuck with me too. So glad you passed it on to your boys, it was indeed excellent.
babylonsister
(171,535 posts)that's remarkable in itself, Babylon, LI, NY. About 40 black people in the whole school, grades 7-12. (I actually have no idea how many black people there were, but not a lot). I'm grateful, and need to re-read the original and this. Thanks!
sheshe2
(86,903 posts)I was in HS then too. It wasn't required reading for me but picked it up on my own. My mom was/is a voracious reader, therefore so were we.
Well you topped me, I was from a small town in Mass and we only had one black woman in school.
UR Welcome!
Number23
(24,544 posts)Stepping outside, Griffin began his personal nightmare. Whites avoided or scorned him. Applying for menial jobs, he met the ritual rudeness of Jim Crow. We dont want you people, a foreman told him. Dont you understand that? Threatened by strangers, followed by thugs, he heard again and again the racial slur for which he had been slapped as a boy. That word, he wrote, leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it, and always it stings.
Carrying just $200 in travelers checks, Griffin took a bus to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where a recent lynching had spread fear through the alleys and streets. Griffin holed up in a rented room and wrote of his overwhelming sense of alienation: Hell could be no more lonely or hopeless. He sought respite at a white friends home before resuming his experimentzigzagging, he would call it, between two worlds. Sometimes passing whites offered him rides; he did not feel he could refuse. Astonished, he soon found many of them simply wanted to pepper him with questions about Negro sex life or make lurid boasts from the swamps of their fantasy lives. Griffin patiently disputed their stereotypes and noted their amazement that this Negro could talk intelligently! Yet nothing gnawed at Griffin so much as the hate stare, venomous glares that left him sick at heart before such unmasked hatred.
He roamed the South from Alabama to Atlanta, often staying with black families who took him in. He glimpsed black rage and self-loathing, as when a fellow bus passenger told him: I hate us. Whites repeatedly insisted blacks were happy. A few whites treated him with decency, including one who apologized for the bad manners of my people. After a month, Griffin could stand no more. A little thinga near-fight when blacks refused to give up their seats to white women on a bussent Griffin scurrying into a colored restroom, where he scrubbed his fading skin until he could pass for white. He then took refuge in a monastery.
This entire piece is amazing. I hope you keep posting things like this in this forum.
One of the most frustrating, tragic and nauseating tenets of American history is the tendency for the voices of people of color to go unheard until a white person says the same thing. Apparently it is too "alien" for people of color to speak for ourselves, we need to "translated" to be made more palatable to white audiences.
Hollywood has a well-documented history of bolstering this tendency as movies ('The Help' and too many others to name) show. The discomfort that Griffin felt being the "voice of Black America" when he wasn't black seems very real to me.
sheshe2
(86,903 posts)And...
That is sad and it is why I would never presume to know what it feels like. I can only empathize. That is why I highlighted
Black Like Me, said activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), is an excellent bookfor whites. Griffin agreed; he eventually curtailed his lecturing on the book, finding it absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own.
Thank you for posting more of the poigant story. So hard to try to tell it in only four paragraphs.
I will indeed keep posting things like this one, Number23.
noiretextatique
(27,275 posts)Racism, that is see posts above for Cindy's thoughtful analysis. I have told this story before, but here it goes again. In a grad school creativity class, I posted a poem titled "never trust the white man," which was something my blond haired, grey eyed great grandmother used to say. The poem was about her life, and why she clung to the drop of African blood in her makeup. The poem told the story of her life...we believe she and her brother were the orphaned children of slaveowners who were adopted by enslaved people. Anyhoo...to make a long story short, I got attacked by my fellow classmates for posting about her life. They did not want to hear about the white mob who forced my great grandparents to leave town in the middle of the night. They felt "offended" by my family's real life experiences. A friend told me: they are not used to hearing us, or our stories. She was right.
mahalo she
xfundy
(5,105 posts)Also read Anne Frank's diary, also unassigned, just because I'd heard of both, and could get the paperbacks cheap at a used bookstore. Learned from both and more, even as I was hiding my "homosexual" identity. There were some parallels, but that wasn't why I read. I learned of the concept of inequality and much later found that it applied to me as well, though I'd always assumed that "we" would never be able to be open, much less accepted.
Still shocked that marriage equality is on the table in my lifetime. Shocked and grateful for those who dared to stand up and speak out in times where they risked their lives to do so.
To those who claim that this civil rights battle is lesser than the major civil rights battle of the 60s, no, we stood up to the same crowd, the same slurs, the same idiotic "everybody knows" statements among those we fought, as well as those who hid behind the bible to deny us our basic humanity.
Cha
(304,374 posts)our lifetime, xfundy!
AnotherDreamWeaver
(2,880 posts)not let her check it out without my parents permission. Because it needed parent approval I checked it out too, just to see what it was about. I think I was in Junior High at the time. Very educational. (California here.)
Behind the Aegis
(54,795 posts)Slightly altered, it still holds true today in regards to racism in general. People think racism is a "Southern problem," and it isn't, it is systemic and countrywide. Most racism is just under the skin, but it is still virulent. Too many think that because it "isn't in your face", that racism is a thing of the past or not an insidious problem. When blatant 'in your face' racism does occur, it is written off as an anomaly...it isn't!
I also recommend "Native Son" by Richard Wright.
sheshe2
(86,903 posts)Trayvon and Jordan are perfect examples of 'in your face' racism. The fact that Zimmerman was defended here at DU is proof of what you say. It's not a Southern problem. It is widespread.
It has been well over 30 years since I read Native Son. I think it is time to read it again.
Thank you, Behind the Aegis.
malaise
(277,303 posts)My best friend and I read and reread Black Like Me.
sheshe2
(86,903 posts)markpkessinger
(8,548 posts). . . and it was a real eye opener!
mstinamotorcity2
(1,451 posts)for knowledge!!