Black Like Me vs Black-White:

Black like Me vs Black White:

In October 1959 a white, 39-year-old Texas novelist decided he would dye his skin black and travel the South. The journal John Howard Griffin kept of that experience, published two years later as Black Like Me, earned him death threats.

It was also hailed as a classic contribution to the story of race relations in America. The San Francisco Chronicle called it "a social document of the first order, providing material absolutely unavailable elsewhere with such authenticity that it cannot be dismissed."

Griffin traveled through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. He wrote of trying to find work and of casual bigotries. He wrote of the kindnesses he found among the black people he came in contact with.

Wings Press, a small San Antonio-based publishing house, has just reissued Black Like Me in a hardcover edition ($24.95). Robert Bonazzi, Griffin's authorized biographer, corrects errors in previous editions and restores certain passages deleted from Griffin's typescript. The book includes a brief foreword by Studs Terkel and an afterword by Bonazzi that surveys the author's life and his views on race.

Griffin grew up in Dallas, studied as a teenager in France, during World War II collaborated with the French Resistance before fleeing the Nazis. He served in the Army Air Force in the Pacific and lost his eyesight as the result of a concussion.
He returned to Texas and wrote novels Ñ among them The Devil Rides Outside (1952) and Nuni (1956). In 1957 Griffin's sight returned, enabling him to launch his experiment in passing. Griffin was also a devout Catholic and an accomplished photographer and musician.

He died in 1980.

Black Like Me is the second Griffin book Wings has published. Last year the house released Street of Seven Angels, a satiric novel on pornography that never appeared in the author's lifetime.

Contact us mailto:milligan@wingspress.com

CONCLUSION:
The current 'Black-White' movie's conception fails to recognize that someone attempted this experience several years ago, and the horrors of that experience was very clearly documented in his book titled 'Black Like Me.' The author Howard Griffin realized from that experience that no White man could completely conceptualized mentally and psychologically, the gravity of the Black male & female historical experience of humiliation, and degradation as a people. And from which they could never fully recover!

Derryck S. Griffith.
Educator-Advocate & Blogger.