Black Like Me turns 50

Cover image of 50th anniversary edition of Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin Cover image of 50th anniversary edition of Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin Image 1 of / 14 Caption Close Black Like Me turns 50 1 / 14 Back to Gallery

A solitary white man - a Texan - dyed his skin black and set off on a life-changing journey through the Deep South in 1959.

Over several weeks, John Howard Griffin searched for work, made friends, suffered physical threats, endured harassment and sat in the back of the bus as a black man.

On one bus ride, he half rose from his seat to offer it to a middle-aged white woman who looked tired. But the black passengers around him frowned their disapproval: "I realized that I was going 'against the race' and the subtle tug-of-war became instantly clear," Griffin writes. "If the whites would not sit with us, let them stand."

In the age of reality TV, a white man posing as black might not seem that provocative. But in the early years of the civil-rights era, it was a blind leap into dangerous territory.

Griffin, who was raised in Fort Worth, described his journey in Black Like Me (1961), a book that stands apart as a singular project on race. Wings Press in San Antonio has just published a 50th anniversary edition.

"You can judge the book on its literary merit, but that's not how I judge it," says Bob Ray Sanders, 64, whose columns for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram often confront racial themes. "I judge it for its moral and historical significance, and the inspiration it gave to those of us still looking for hope in those days."

Still taught in high schools across the country, the book jump-starts conversation and personal reflection about race.

"My students were just awed by the fact that he [Griffin] was not allowed to use a bathroom," says Geneva Hargrove," a former high school English teacher who now directs federal and state programs at Anson ISD, near Abilene.

"They already knew about sitting in the back of the bus. Lynching. Slavery. But it hit home for them when not only could he not find a job, but he wasn't allowed to use the same restroom as whites."

More Information Works by and about John Howard Griffin Wings Press has published books by and about Griffin, including Roberto Bonazzi's Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me. The books are also available as ebooks through bn.com, amazon.com and other outlets. Go to wingspress.com for more information.

Griffin changed the color of his skin to explore how differently he'd be treated, explains Roberto Bonazzi, Griffin's longtime friend and biographer.

"He had seen the suppression of the Jews in France during World War II, so he was sophisticated about certain things," Bonazzi says. "He assumed it would be a matter of inconvenience, but it turned out to be a different reality."

Becoming black

Griffin spoke with Sepia magazine about his plans to travel as a black man, and the magazine agreed to run a series of articles about his journey.

Under a dermatologist's care, Griffin took the drug Oxsoralen to darken his skin, sat under a sunlamp, and ground stain into his flesh to even out the color. After several days, the 39-year-old set out on Nov. 7, 1959, for an unmapped adventure that would take him through Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia.

"How did one start?" Griffin writes. "The night lay out there waiting. A thousand questions presented themselves. The strangeness of my situation struck me anew - I was a man born old at midnight into a new life. How does such a man act? Where does he go to find food, water, a bed?"

For weeks, Griffin lived in the black sections of different cities, staying at black-only hotels, eating at cafes owned and run by blacks, traveling alongside black men and women.

He was most anxious in Mississippi, where a recent trial had set both blacks and whites on edge. In a case where a black man was lynched and murdered, not only did jurors fail to indict the men accused, they also declined to review any of the evidence compiled against them. Griffin was so rattled one evening that he called a friend - a white newspaperman whose commitment to civil rights had made him persona non grata with much of the white community - and spent a few days at his home.

After several days of hitchhiking and fielding shockingly intimate sexual questions from the curious white men who stopped to give him a lift, Griffin took shelter with a poor but generous black family. The children kissed him good night and he stretched out on the floor, unable to sleep: "I felt again the Negro children's soft lips against mine, so like the feel of my own children's good-night kisses. I saw again their large eyes, guileless, not yet aware that doors into wonderlands of security, opportunity and hope were closed to them."

Before Black Like Me

Griffin was born in Dallas and raised in Fort Worth, as Bonazzi notes in an afterword to the new edition of Black Like Me

Hungry for a better education, he responded to an ad for a private school in France and was accepted, sailing off to Europe in 1935 at age 15. There, he attended classes with African students.

After studying literature and medicine at French universities, Griffin joined the underground resistance during the German occupation of World War II. He helped smuggle Jewish children out of Paris and into the country, where they would be sent to safety in England.

In 1940 he returned to the States, enlisting in the Army Air Corps the following year. On the Pacific island of Morotai in 1945, an explosion gave him a concussion and impaired his vision. After returning to his family's farm in Mansfield, about 20 miles southeast of Fort Worth, he was declared legally blind.

Over the next decade Griffin got married, started a family, and published a few books. In 1957, the writer began to see bits of red light. Over the course of several weeks, his eyesight returned.

But the idea for Black Like Me came to him in 1956, when he still was blind.

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League was traveling the country, surveying blacks and whites about school segregation. (Texas schools weren't desegregated until 1962.) Griffin sat on a panel in Mansfield and listened to concerns of various residents.

"He was blind," Bonazzi says, "and he couldn't tell whether the speakers were black or white. They all had a Texas accent. He was really struck by this, that you could only tell the balance of a person by their heart and not the color of their skin."

Sanders remembers the racial atmosphere around Fort Worth at that time. Texas practiced what he calls "benevolent" racism, as opposed to the "harsh" racism of the Deep South.

"Fort Worth identified itself as more Western that Southern," Sanders explains. "There was a tolerance even though there was segregation. I remember thinking there was always somebody who was willing to be a benefactor to some of the black people in town."

The aftermath

In 1960, a few months after Griffin returned to Mansfield, news of his journey started to spread. Time magazine wrote a story about him and Mike Wallace interviewed him on national TV.

When Sepia magazine started publishing Griffin's articles, life in Mansfield became increasingly uncomfortable. Griffin's family received threats and once-cordial whites looked at Griffin with open hostility. One day, Griffin was hung in effigy in town. Eventually, the family was driven into exile in Mexico, where Griffin wrote Black Like Me in 1961.

Yet he never stopped speaking and writing about his extraordinary journey.

In 1964, Griffin was standing by the side of the road in Mississippi with a flat tire.

"He had been followed, as he and many civil rights workers often were in the South," Bonazzi explains. "He thought someone was going to help him. Instead, a group dragged him away and beat him with chains, left him for dead. It took him five months to recover. He was 44."

A film of the book was made that same year - a bad film, according to Bonazzi - starring James Whitmore.

Griffin spent his remaining years writing and lecturing. He died of a heart attack and complications from diabetes in 1980 at age 60. His four children still live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

"In his lectures, he always said, 'I don't speak for black people, I speak for myself,' " notes Bonazzi, who married Griffin's widow, Elizabeth, in 1983.

For Bonazzi, Griffin's most significant accomplishment was facing his own racism. In the book, when Griffin first sees his black face in the mirror, he is stunned: "In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger - a fierce, bald, very dark Negro - glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me. The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship."

But Griffin faced his antipathy toward the man in the mirror.

"He realized later that he was unbiased intellectually, but that emotionally, he was a racist," Bonazzi explains. "He wasn't afraid to talk about that. When he lectured, most of his audience was white and many of them were students. He said it was important if you grew up in the South to work to face this kind of racism. If you face it, he said, you're on your way to becoming unbiased, unprejudiced."

For Sanders, the legacy of Black Like Me is not Griffin's individual experience, but that he was brave enough to share it with the rest of the world.

"He was willing to come back, write it down, go on TV, go on speaking tours," Sanders says. "Here's a white man telling America at least some of the things I feel."

maggie.galehouse@chron.com