Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

When the segregationist argues that the Negro is scholastically inferior, he presents the most eloquent possible argument for desegregated schools; he admits that so long as the Negro is kept in tenth-rate schools he will remain scholastically behind white children.

All the cherished question-begging epithets applied to the Negro race, and widely accepted as truth even by men of good will, simply prove untrue when one lives among them. This, of course, excludes the trash element, which is the same everywhere and is no more evident among Negroes than whites.

I had spent a day without food and water for no other reason than that my skin was black. I was sitting on a tub in the swamp for no other reason.

She refused, saying that I had brought more than I had taken. “If you gave us a penny, we’d owe you change.”

my face skin, with the continued medication, exposure to sunlight and ground-in stain, was what Negroes call a “pure brown” - a smooth dark color that made me look like millions of others. I noted, too, that my face had lost all animation. In repose, it had taken on the strained, disconsolate expression that is written on the countenance of so many Southern Negroes. My mind had become the same way, dozing empty for long periods.

My body, so long unexposed to the sun or the sun lamp, had paled to a café-au-lait color.

A group of nicely dressed Negro women solicited contributions for missionary activities. I placed some change in their cup and accepted a tract explaining the missionary program. Then, curious to see how they would fare with the whites, I walked along with them. We approached the stationkeeper. His face soured and he growled his refusal. We walked on. In not a single instance did a white hear them out.

I talked with her and the children as their husband and father, while reflected in the glass windows of the booth I saw another man they would not know.

The night was always a comfort. Most of the whites were in their homes. The threat was less. A Negro blended inconspicuously into the darkness. Night coming tenderly Black like me. At such a time, the Negro can look at the starlit skies and find that he has, after all, a place in the universal order of things. The stars, the black skies affirm his humanity, his validity as a human being.

In Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, I encountered a new atmosphere. The Negro’s feeling of utter hopelessness is here replaced by a determined spirit of passive resistance. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’ s influence, like an echo of Gandhi’s, prevails. Nonviolent and prayerful resistance to discrimination is the keynote. Here, the Negro has committed himself to a definite stand. He will go to jail, suffer any humiliation, but he will not back down. He will take the insults and abuses stoically so that his children will not have to take them in the future.

I could not make out the white viewpoint in Montgomery. It was too fluid, too changeable. A superficial calm hung over the city. At night police were everywhere. I felt that the two races stood like blocks of concrete, immovable, and that the basic issues of right and wrong, justice and injustice, were lost from view by the whites.

On Sunday, I made the experiment of dressing well and walking past some of the white churches just as services were over. In each instance, as the women came through the church doors and saw me, the “spiritual bouquets” changed to hostility. The transformation was grotesque.

Yes, looking into the mirror, I felt I could pass. I put on a white shirt, but by contrast it made my face and hands appear too dark. I changed to a brown sports shirt, which made my skin appear lighter. This shift was nerve-racking. As a white man I could not be seen leaving a Negro home at midnight. If I checked into a white hotel and then got too much sun, it would, in combination with the medication still in my system, turn me too dark and I would not be able to return to the hotel.

I took a seat beside white men at the counter and the waitress smiled at me. It was a miracle. I ordered food and was served, and it was a miracle.

I gave him his tip, received his bow and realized that already he was far from me, distant as the Negro is distant from the white. I locked the door, sat on the bed and smoked a cigarette. I was the same man who could not possibly have bought his way into this room a week ago.

The face of humanity smiled - good smiles, full of warmth; irresistible smiles that confirmed my impression that these people were simply unaware of the situation with the Negroes who passed them on the street - that there was not even the communication of intelligent awareness between them.

They did not know that the Negro long ago learned he must tell them what they want to hear, not what is.

This was the time to listen, not to talk, but it was difficult.

I walked into a Negro section where I had not been before. I was a lone white man in a Negro neighborhood. I, the white man, got from the Negro the same shriveling treatment I, the Negro, had got from the white man. I thought, “Why me? I have been one of you.” Then I realized it was the same stupidity I had encountered at the New Orleans bus station. It was nothing I had done, it was not me, but the color of my skin.

Was it worth trying to show the one race what went on behind the mask of the other?

I was the same man, whether white or black. Yet when I was white, I received the brotherly-love smiles and privileges from whites and the hate stares or obsequiousness from Negroes. And when I was a Negro, the whites judged me fit for the junk heap, while the Negroes treated me with great warmth.

I received the information from a polite clerk and turned away from the counter. “Boy!” I heard a woman’s voice, harsh and loud. I glanced toward the door to see a large, matriarchal woman, elderly and impatient. Her pinched face grimaced and she waved me to her. “Boy, come here. Hurry!” Astonished, I obeyed.

The famed Tuskegee Institute was, I learned, out of the city limits. In fact the major portion of the Negro residential area is out of the city limits - put there when the city fathers decided it was the simplest way to invalidate the Negro vote in local elections.

I found an atmosphere of great courtesy, with students more dignified and more soberly dressed than one finds on white campuses. Education for them is a serious business. They are so close to the days when their ancestors were kept totally illiterate, when their ancestors learned to read and write at the risk of severe punishment, that learning is an almost sacred privilege now. They see it also as the only possible way out of the morass in which the Negro finds himself.

It’s people like me that are your only hope. How do you expect me to observe if you won’t talk to me?”

I’m just trying to show some brotherhood.”

felt great pity for him. He was obviously lonely and fearful of rejection by the very people he sought to help. But I wondered if he could know how offensive this overweening “brotherhood” demonstration was. Others stood by and watched with frowns of disapproval.

The unpardonable had been said. The white man, despite his protestations of brotherhood, had made the first dirty suggestion that came to his mind. He was probably unaware of it but it escaped none of us. By the very tone of his question he revealed his contempt for us. His voice had taken on a hard edge, putting us in our place, as they say. He had become just like the whites he decried.

Negroes around me shook their heads slowly, with regret. We had witnessed a pitiful one-man attempt to make up for some of the abuses the man had seen practiced against the Negro.

We winced and turned into mummies, staring vacantly, insulating ourselves against further insults. “No - for God’s sake - please - no rough stuff,” the driver pleaded.

At the Atlanta station we waited for the whites to get off. One of them, a large middle-aged man, hesitated, turned and stepped back toward us. We hardened ourselves for another insult. He bent over to speak to the young Negro. “I just wanted to tell you that before he slapped you, he’d have had to slap me down first,” he said. None of us smiled. We wondered why he had not spoken up while the whites were still on the bus.

Suddenly I had had enough. Suddenly I could stomach no more of this degradation - not of myself but of all men who were black like me.

In medieval times, men sought sanctuary in churches. Nowadays, for a nickel, I could find sanctuary in a colored rest room. Then, sanctuary had the smell of incense-permeated walls. Now it had the odor of disinfectant. The irony of it hit me. I was back in the land of my forefathers, Georgia. The town of Griffin was named for one of them. Too I, a Negro, carried the name hated by all Negroes, for former Governor Griffin (no kin that I would care to discover) devoted himself heroically to the task of keeping Negroes “in their place.” Thanks in part to his efforts, this John Griffin celebrated a triumphant return to the land from which his people had sprung by seeking sanctuary in a toilet cubicle at the bus station.

I realized that though I was well dressed for a Negro, my appearance looked shabby for a white man. He judged me by that and indicated a place where lodging was inexpensive.

Every time a white person got off, the driver said politely: “Watch your step, please.” But whenever a Negro approached the front to get off, the driver’s silence fairly roared.

The subtlety of it escaped the whites on the bus, but it in no way escaped the driver or the Negroes at the back. I heard stifled chuckles of approval from behind me. The driver slammed the doors harder than necessary and lurched the bus forward.

Here men know nothing of hatred. They sought to make themselves conform ever more perfectly to God’s will, whereas outside I had seen mostly men who sought to make God’s will conform to their wretched prejudices. Here men sought their center in God, whereas outside they sought it in themselves. The difference was transforming.

chanted the solemn Salve Regina so beautifully, so tenderly, we felt the crusts of our lives fall away and we rested in the deep hush of eternity.

the type of white man who would come to the Trappists - well, he comes here to be in an atmosphere of dedication to God. Such a man would hardly keep one eye on God and the other on the color of his neighbor’s skin.”

“Didn’t Shakespeare say something about ‘every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up’? He knew his religious bigots.”

He goes on to say that this kind of religion, which declines wisdom, even though it may call itself Christian, is in reality as anti-Christian as atheism. I was startled that the French philosopher could so perfectly characterize the racists of our Southern states. Then I realized that he was describing racists everywhere and from all times

I felt myself flush with embarrassment at having disturbed the Trappist silence. Surely monks sleeping in other cells, their bodies exhausted from work in the fields and hours of prayers, heard me and lay awake wondering.

I had never encountered such obtuseness in a first-class hotel, and I told them so, but this only increased their inhospitality. I decided not to stay.

Atlanta has gone far in proving that “the Problem” can be solved and in showing us the way to do it. 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.

the city has been blessed by a newspaper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that is not afraid to make a stand for right and justice. Its most noted columnist (and now publisher), Ralph McGill, Pulitzer Prize winner, is significantly referred to as “Rastus” by the White Citizens Councils.

The great danger in the South comes precisely from the fact that the public is not informed. Newspapers shirk notoriously their editorial responsibilities and print what they think their readers want. They lean with the prevailing winds and employ every fallacy of logic in order to editorialize harmoniously with popular prejudices. They also keep a close eye on possible economic reprisals from the Councils and the Klans, plus other superpatriotic groups who bring pressure to bear on the newspapers’ advertisers.

“There is no ‘big Me’ and ‘little you,’ ” T.M. Alexander, one of the founders of the Southeastern Fidelity Fire Insurance, said. “We must pool all of our resources, material and mental, to gain the respect that will enable all of us to walk the streets with the dignity of American citizens.”

At Spelman College, hearing Rosalyn Pope play magnificently the Bach Toccata in D, and then the strange, bewildered expression on her face when she told me about arriving in Paris to spend a year studying piano - the strangeness of living in a great city where she could attend concerts to her fill, where she could walk into any door where she was a human being first and last and not dismissed as a “Negro”;

I felt strangely sad to leave the world of the Negro after having shared it so long - almost as though I were fleeing my share of his pain and heartache.

the deepest dread of the task that now lay before me - the task of telling truths that would make me and my family the target of all the hate groups.