Black Like Me

In the autumn of 1959, a white Texan journalist named John Howard Griffin traveled across the Deep South of the United States disguised as a black man. "Black Like Me" is Griffin's own account of his journey. Originally commissioned by the African-American general-interest magazine Sepia under the title "Journey into Shame," it was published in book form in 1961, revealing to a white audience the day-to-day experience of racism in segregation-era America. Selling over five million copies, "Black Like Me" became one of the best-known accounts of race and racism in the 1960s and helped turn the eyes of white society towards the everyday indignities and injustices of segregation. Today, sixty years after Griffin's extraordinary journey across the racial divide, "Black Like Me" stands as a fascinating document of its times.

"John Howard Griffin has come closer to understanding what it's like to be black in America than any white man that I know." - Louis Lomax, Saturday Review

"If it was a frightening experience for him as nothing but a make-believe Negro for sixty-six days, then you think about what real Negroes in America have gone through for 400 years." - Malcolm X

John Howard Griffin was born in Texas in 1920. As a student in France in 1939, he was caught up with the outbreak of the Second World War and worked with the French Resistance before joining the US Army. Hit by shrapnel in an air raid, he lost his sight; a bout of spinal malaria in 1955 led to the paralysis of his lower body, but remarkably he regained both his sight and the use of his legs two years later. After the publication of "Black Like Me," he worked as a human rights activist and taught at the University of Peace. He died in 1980.