A short life of the author
John Howard Griffin (16 June 1920 – 9 September 1980) was an American journalist, novelist, and photographer whose single most famous work — Black Like Me (1961) — is one of the most remarkable and controversial experiments in American journalism. In October 1959, Griffin, a white Texan, underwent a regimen of oral medication (the vitiligo drug methoxsalen), ultraviolet light treatments, and skin stains to darken his complexion, then travelled through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia as a Black man for six weeks. The book he wrote about the experience — the casual cruelties, the refusal of service, the constant vigilance, the sexual assumptions of white strangers, the warmth and solidarity of the Black communities he entered — became a bestseller, was translated into fourteen languages, and remains one of the essential documents of life under Jim Crow.
Life Before Black Like Me
Griffin was born in Dallas, Texas, into a middle-class white Southern family. He was an exceptional student who, at fifteen, enrolled in a French preparatory school and then studied medicine in France. During World War II he served in the Army Air Forces in the South Pacific, where he was stationed on an island with indigenous Solomon Islanders. He was involved in smuggling Jewish families out of France before the war — a fact that speaks to his lifelong commitment to confronting racial persecution.
Griffin suffered a combat injury that gradually destroyed his eyesight; he was completely blind from 1946 to 1957. During his decade of blindness, he converted to Catholicism, published two novels — The Devil Rides Outside (1952) and Nuni (1956) — and developed a contemplative, intensely moral sensibility shaped by Thomas Merton and the French Catholic intellectual tradition. His sight returned suddenly and unexpectedly in 1957, and it was the experience of seeing again — of confronting the visual reality of racial segregation after years of living in a world organised by sound and touch — that prompted the Black Like Me experiment.
Black Like Me (1961)
The book began as a series of articles in Sepia magazine and was published in book form by Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Griffin’s method was both journalistically audacious and ethically complex. By passing as Black, he placed himself in genuine danger — the danger that any Black man faced in the Jim Crow South — and his account has the authority of lived experience rather than external observation.
The power of Black Like Me lies in its accumulation of ordinary indignities: the difficulty of finding a place to eat, the hostility of white strangers, the assumption that a Black man walking alone at night is a criminal, the grotesque sexual curiosity of white men who approach him with questions about Black sexuality. Griffin’s tone is restrained and precise — he reports without sermonising — and the effect is devastating.
The book made Griffin famous and made him a target. He was hanged in effigy in his hometown of Mansfield, Texas. He received death threats that forced his family to move to Mexico for a period. He was beaten by white supremacists in 1964, sustaining injuries that contributed to his declining health.
Critical Questions
Black Like Me has been both praised as a courageous act of witness and criticised on grounds that have become more pointed over time. The fundamental objection is that Griffin’s experiment rests on the assumption that white Americans would only believe testimony about racism if it came from a white man — that the daily testimony of millions of Black Americans was not sufficient. This criticism is fair, and Griffin himself acknowledged it in later years.
The book’s lasting significance is perhaps less as a revelation of what Black people experienced — which they already knew — than as a document of white moral awakening, and of the specific mechanisms by which a white man who considered himself decent and unprejudiced was forced to confront the reality of a system he had never seen from the inside.
Later Work
Griffin became a prominent civil rights speaker and writer. He was chosen by Thomas Merton’s estate to write Merton’s biography, producing Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton (1983, published posthumously). He was a serious photographer whose portraits of racial injustice in the South have documentary value. He suffered from diabetes and the long-term effects of methoxsalen; he died in Fort Worth at sixty.
Collecting Griffin
Black Like Me (1961, Houghton Mifflin) in first edition with dust jacket brings $200–$500. The book has been continuously in print for over sixty years. The Devil Rides Outside (1952, Collins) is scarce in first edition and brings $50–$150. Signed copies of any Griffin work are uncommon.