Other editions of book Black Like Me

THE HISTORY-MAKING CLASSIC ABOUT CROSSING THE COLOR LINE IN AMERICA'S SEGREGATED SOUTH“One of the deepest, most penetrating documents yet set down on the racial question.”—Atlanta Journal & Constitution In the Deep South of the 1950’s, a color line was etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross that 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. What happened to John Howard Griffin—from the outside and within himself—as he made his way through the segregated Deep South is recorded in this searing work of nonfiction. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity every American must read. With an Epilogue by the author and an Afterword by Robert Bonazzi

THE HISTORY-MAKING CLASSIC ABOUT CROSSING THE COLOR LINE IN AMERICA'S SEGREGATED SOUTH“One of the deepest, most penetrating documents yet set down on the racial question.”—Atlanta Journal & Constitution In the Deep South of the 1950’s, a color line was etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross that 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. What happened to John Howard Griffin—from the outside and within himself—as he made his way through the segregated Deep South is recorded in this searing work of nonfiction. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity every American must read.

Writer John Howard Griffin decided to perform an experiment fifty years ago. In order to learn firsthand how one race could withstand the second class citizenship imposed on it by another, he dyed his white skin dark, left his family, and traveled to the South to live as a black man. What began as scientific research ended up changing his life in every way imaginable. This is an eyewitness account of discrimination and segregation that is terrifying and degrading, and its publication caused a furor. As narrated by Ray Childs, this first-ever recording of Black like Me will leave each listener deeply affected. John Howard Griffin's groundbreaking and controversial work helped bring the full effect of racism to the forefront of America's conscience-and it has lessons to be learned over half a century later.

In the autumn of 1959, a white Texan journalist named John Howard Griffin travelled across the Deep South of the United States disguised as a black man. Black Like Me is Griffin's own account of his journey. Originally commissioned by the African-American general-interest magazine Sepia under the title 'Journey into Shame', it was published in book-form in 1961, revealing to a white audience the day-to-day experience of racism in segregation-era America.Selling over five million copies, Black Like Me became one of the best-known accounts of race and racism in the 1960s, and helped turn the eyes of white society towards the everyday indignities and injustices of segregation. Today, sixty years after Griffin's extraordinary journey across the racial divide, Black Like Me's unrepeatable act of journalistic intrepidity stands as a fascinating document of its times. 'John Howard Griffin has come closer to understanding what it's like to be black in America than any white man that I know.' Louis Lomax, Saturday Review'If it was a frightening experience for him as nothing but a make-believe Negro for sixty-six days, then you think about what real Negroes in America have gone through for 400 years.' Malcom X

"1961. SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN. He trudges southern streets searching for a place where he may eat or rest, looking vainly for a job other than menial labor, feeling the "hate stare" ... He is John Howard Griffin, a white man who darkened the color of his skin and crossed the line into a country of hate, fear, and hopelessness--the country of the American Negro."* *taken from the back cover.

Writer John Howard Griffin decided to perform an experiment fifty years ago. In order to learn firsthand how one race could withstand the second class citizenship imposed on it by another, he dyed his white skin dark, left his family, and traveled to the South to live as a black man. What began as scientific research ended up changing his life in every way imaginable. This is an eyewitness account of discrimination and segregation that is terrifying and degrading, and its publication caused a furor. As narrated by Ray Childs, this first-ever recording of Black like Me will leave each listener deeply affected. John Howard Griffin's groundbreaking and controversial work helped bring the full effect of racism to the forefront of America's conscience-and it has lessons to be learned over half a century later.