“ Black Like Me disabused the idea that minorities were acting out of paranoia,” says Gerald Early, a black scholar at Washington University and editor of Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation. As the civil rights movement tested various forms of civil disobedience, Griffin began a human odyssey through the South, from New Orleans to Atlanta.įifty years ago this month, Griffin published a slim volume about his travels as a “black man.” He expected it to be “an obscure work of interest primarily to sociologists,” but Black Like Me, which told white Americans what they had long refused to believe, sold ten million copies and became a modern classic. To comprehend the lives of black people, he had darkened his skin to become black. But Griffin, a novelist of extraordinary empathy rooted in his Catholic faith, had devised a daring experiment.
A few white writers had argued for integration. Many black authors had written about the hardship of living in the Jim Crow South. John Howard Griffin had embarked on a journey unlike any other. “Yeah, I been shining some for a white man-” “Is there something familiar about these shoes?” Rag in hand, the shoeshine man said nothing until the hulking man spoke.
He was certain he’d shined these shoes before, and for a man about as tall and broad-shouldered.
Late in 1959, on a sidewalk in New Orleans, a shoe-shine man suffered a sense of déjà vu.
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