Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

And in the midst of it, the picture of the prejudice and bigotry from which I had just come flashed into my mind, and I heard myself mutter: “My God, how can men do it when there are things like this in the world?”

“The only way I’ll run it is if you insist,” he said. “Then I think we must run it,” I said, wishing with all my heart I could drop it. However, Sepia, unlike many magazines, is widely read in the Deep South by Negroes. I felt it was the best way of letting them know that their condition was known, that the world knew more about them than they suspected; the best way to give them hope.

none of which actually help to reveal the truth of what it is like to be discriminated against. They cancel truth almost more than they reveal it.

They talked for a long time. I realized that they were tying up the line so that no hate calls could come through.

After that, silence. We sat and waited, but the phone did not ring. The silence was so unnatural, so ominous, it weighed heavy on us.

I looked at him with a resurgence of faith in a public figure.

On Tuesday I did a TV documentary with Harry Golden. The Mike Wallace show went on that evening, and then a long radio interview on the Long John show from midnight until four thirty in the morning. I got no sleep. Benn Hall offered me tranquilizers, but I did not dare take one for fear it would put me out completely. The Time article would be out that evening. I was anxious to see how they would treat the story. But I was most nervous about the Mike Wallace show, and told Benn Hall that if Wallace asked one wrong question, I would get up and walk out.

He fumbled uncomfortably for words and I took a liking to him. From the hints he dropped (“We’ve investigated you pretty thoroughly”), I was aghast - he knew things about the trip, the names of people I had stayed with - many things I had tried to hide in order to protect the people involved.

Wallace talked and smoked. He poured intelligent questions into me and kept his face close, absorbing my attention, encouraging me. It was a supercharged moment. I answered, forgetting everything except him and his questions. Fatigue disappeared. Fascination took over. The excitement sustained us. I realized, when the time was up, that it had gone well. And when we went off the air, Wallace shouted, “Top notch. Cancel everything and schedule it immediately.”

The local roadside café, a gathering place for the segregationists, had a new sign. For some time it had carried a sign reading WE DON’T SERVE NEGROES. Then it was replaced by a larger sign: WHITES ONLY. Now another had joined it: NO ALBINOS ALLOWED.

a dummy, half black, half white, with my name on it and a yellow streak painted down its back, was hanging from the wire.

$25 FINE FOR DUMPING DEAD ANIMALS

“I don’t know - the way people have been acting. I was afraid if they saw me coming into your store, they might stop trading here.” “That’s the kind of customer we don’t want in the first place,” the grocer said. In the context of the day, this was heroism. Someone in town dared to express an opinion.

On my way out of the lane that leads from my parents’ place to my home, the neighbors at the halfway point waved, but those near the highway - people with whom we have been cordial - gave me the most violently hostile stare.

He said this coldly, without emotion, neither threatening nor sympathetic, exactly the way one would say: “The weatherman’s promising rain for tomorrow.”

we learned that they burned a cross just above our house at the Negro school, and that someone remarked they should have burned it on my land. I wish they had, I wish they had - it would have been far better than burning it at the school.

The mail poured in, hearteningly favorable and moving.

tragic. I, too, say let us be peaceful; but the only way to do this is first to assure justice. By keeping “peaceful” in this instance, we end up consenting to the destruction of all peace - for so long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace, all trust in man’s good intentions toward his fellow man.

six thousand letters to date and only nine of them were abusive.

I do not believe that it takes a genius to pierce to the heart of a situation to which Southern chivalry once gave, among other things, the mulatto.

With all of the pious talk against communism, the present conflict over integration is doing the work of the communists almost better than they can do it themselves.

it is only a mixture of ignorance and conceit that leads one section of the country to assume that no human beings on earth but themselves can understand the conditions under which they live.

the desolation of a little town on a frightfully hot Sunday struck me. And it struck me, too, that no one there forgets, no one there forgives. I ran the lines of disapproval every time I drove through town to my office at the edge of the woods.

I fixed my gaze on the sandy ruts and looked neither to right nor left. (I had tried nodding too many times.) In my rearview mirror, I saw them after I had passed, saw them stand like statues peering after me through the fog of pink dust raised by my wheels.

me. I could not allow them to say they had “chased” me out. They had promised to fix me on July 15th, and now they said they would do it August 15th.

“Children have to be taught that kind of filth. We’d never permit ours to learn it.”

I pray that the Negro will not miss his chance to rise to greatness, to build from the strength gained through his past suffering and, above all, to rise beyond vengeance. If some spark does set the keg afire, it will be a senseless tragedy of ignorant against ignorant, injustice answering injustice - a holocaust that will drag down the innocent and right-thinking masses of human beings. Then we will all pay for not having cried for justice long ago.

experiment that led to writing Black Like Me was done at the very end of 1959, before the first “freedom rides” or any other manifestation of national concern about racial injustice. It was undertaken to discover if America was involved in the practice of racism against black Americans. Most white Americans denied any taint of racism and really believed that in this land we judged every man by his qualities as a human individual.

Black men told me that the only way a white man could hope to understand anything about this reality was to wake up some morning in a black man’s skin. I decided to try this in order to test this one thing. In order to make the test, I would alter my pigment and shave my head, but change nothing else about myself. I would keep my clothing, my speech patterns, my credentials, and I would answer every question truthfully.

As soon as white men or women saw me, they automatically assumed I possessed a whole set of false characteristics (false not only to me but to all black men). They could not see me or any other black man as a human individual because they buried us under the garbage of their stereotyped view of us.

in a sense, such white men had good evidence for these claims, because if black men did not, in those days, play the stereotyped role of the “good Negro,” if he did not do his yessing and grinning and act out the stereotyped image, then he was immediately considered a “bad Negro,” called “uppity, smart-alecky, arrogant,” and he could lose his job, be attacked, driven away.

They claimed that they always treated black people wonderfully well and always would so long as black people “stayed in their place.” If you asked them what that “place” was, they could not really say, but every black man knew that place was right in the middle of the stereotype.

In those days, the deepest despair hung over the lives of black people, a sense of utter hopelessness, for it seemed that no one in this country knew - or if they knew, couldn’t care less - about this hopeless situation.

They did not realize that every time black men thought they had found a loophole in the closed society, a way to accomplish this, that loophole was quickly plugged by the consent of all white society. For example, we did not see WHITE ONLY signs on the doors of libraries (where we could find learning and books), but we knew we had better not try to enter one. We saw no WHITE ONLY signs on the doors of schools or universities, but we knew it was suicidal to try to enter one.

With the beginning of the freedom rides, the sit-ins, the display of heroic courage and commitment on the part of many who engaged in these activities, and with the rallying around Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, that feeling of despair began to change into hope. Someone did know. Someone did care.

It got so bad that Lillian Smith wrote: “It’s high time we stopped giving the communists credit for every decent, brave, considerate act” white men might show in regard to black men.

We led strange, hidden lives. We were advocating one thing: that this country rid itself of the racism that prevented some citizens from living as fully functioning men and as a result dehumanized all men. We were advocating only that this country live up to its promises to all citizens. But since racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion - a great many people loathed us for knocking holes in these respectable guises.

One thing was clear: we had to accept the fact that these principles were worth dying for, and that there were plenty of people who were willing to see us disappear. In one year we lost seven friends and colleagues in death, of whom only one died a natural death; the others were killed.