The DFW has an impressive literary scene & I love it. While bookstore hopping I started picking up local stories. Black Like Me, written by a white journalist from a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth, was one of the books.
I first learned of this book back in the day from an episode of Boy Meets World when the boys decide to dress like a woman for an article called “Chick Like Me” after reading Black Like Me in class. It wasn’t until visiting the DFW and having a chat with a local colleague that I learned the author was from Mansfield, Texas.
The author, John Howard Griffin, goes to a dermatologist to get a methoxsalen prescription (a vitiligo medication) and a sun lamp to darken his skin. He spends six weeks at the end of 1959 as a Black man traveling through New Orleans, Hattiesburg, Biloxi, Mobile, Montgomery, Auburn, and Atlanta for research purposes. He also visits Tuskegee, Spellman, and Dillard Universities (when they were still colleges). The submissions were originally articles for a newspaper. The title of this project comes from the final line of Langston Hugh’s Dream Variation “Night coming tenderly, Back like me.”
Questions Without Answers
Honestly, I began reading Black Like Me with prejudice & opposition to its development methodology. I started by asking, why?
Why did a white man need to go through such efforts to change his skin tone just so he could understand what it was like to be black in America?
He didn’t need to change his skin color to observe a white shopkeeper’s friendly disposition toward him turn cold and hostile when waiting on a Black person. He could see the “No coloreds” signs and the “Whites Only” signs as a white man. He didn’t have to darken his skin to ask himself how far away the closest Black bathroom was, water fountain, etc.
Additionally, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man was written in 1912. Nella Larsen wrote Passing in 1929. Richard Wright published Native Son in 1940. James Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain had been available since 1953. We already had stories of World War II heroes surviving Nazis only to be lynched in their service dress through The South. The Montgomery Bus Boycott had triggered a Supreme Court Ruling by several years before this project. The Little Rock Nine made national news when President Eisenhower had to send in federal troops to escort Black kids to school in 1957. Carolyn Bennet already called for Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till’s lynching in 1955…just four years before this little project. That’s a strong indicator of Black Life in America.
Why weren’t these stories enough? Why did a white man want to contribute to this discourse? What did he have to offer that hadn’t been offered by countless Black people for the past three centuries already? Why did he want inclusion?
The author never explained why he felt he needed to leave Texas for this experience. There’s a dearth of Civil Rights narratives coming out of Texas. He missed an opportunity to change that. Instead, he seemed to do what EVERY region outside “the deep south” do — point their fingers and say “See, segregation and discrimination and racism is a Alabama-Mississippi-Louisiana thing. We DoN’t HaVe ThOsE pRoBlEmS hErE.”
By the way, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Ft Worth on Oct. 22, 1959 — Two weeks before the “Black Like Me” project began. MLK, Jr. had to stay with a local family because there wasn’t a hotel for Black people in the entire state of Texas. The first Black hotel in Texas opened in Wichita Falls the day after MLK arrived. Black Airmen stationed at Sheppard AFB needed a hotel. But there’s no mention of either of these events in the book. There’s an environment ripe for this project within his region. Was the author oblivious to what was going on in his backyard?
I kept looking for the answers but never got the answers.
Read Next: The Accommodation for a Civil Rights History of Dallas. I picked this banned book up while bookstore hopping at Deep Vellum Publishing. Review coming shortly.
Challenges In The Search for Authentic Answers
The author had questions of his own. “If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South what adjustments would he have to make?”
The author does point out the inability to get authentic answers just by asking or interviewing Black people. As demonstrated in Kathryn Stockett’s, The Help, terrorism scared most Black people into silence. Black people (like W.E.B DuBois & Booker T.Washington) so delicately wrote the accounts of Black life to avoid violent responses. Griffin Observes:
“The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him.”
(Black Like Me p. 7)
and later:
“They did not know that the Negro long ago learned he must tell them what they want to hear, not what is.”
(Black Like Me p. 123).
I think of the many instances this phenomenon still goes on in communications about race.
Even with the author’s disguise, the authenticity is jeopardized. Namely, because Griffin’s behaviors were not those of an adult man who grew up Black. That was what struck me most when he decided to go hitch-hiking from Mobile to Montgomery. As a Black man. At night. In 1959.
Notable Events in Griffin’s Research
The most WTF moments for me came during a stint while Griffin spent time hitch-hiking through Mississippi and Alabama. White men would not give him a lift during the day because they didn’t want to be seen with him. But at night he never had trouble getting a ride with over a dozen white men.
With all the stories I’ve heard from my family in Alabama, getting in cars, at night, with white men is not one of them. I asked around. This is not something my southern Black friends have heard in their family’s oral histories either. A more common was to travel by jumping on a freight train. My dad and uncles have told stories of this. This was also the case with the famed 1931 Scottsboro Boys.
The crudeness and audacity of the conversations during these car rides revealed a fixation on the sex lives of Black people. The fixation is not completely foreign to the perverted curiosities of today.
One married civic leader with children bragged about r@ping all the Black girls who worked for him. When the author got silent, the politician threatened to kill him and feed him to alligators (a well-known practice). One young driver was bold enough to ask to see the author’s penis. Again, the author went silent. Trying to release the awkward tension, the driver assures the author he wasn’t “going to do anything” to him and adds, “I’m not queer or anything.” As if being straight absolves him from the audacity! He continues, “I’ve just never seen a Negro penis before.” Like, wtf do you need to? How does seeing one impact your life?
Which are the exact two sentences I used a few years ago when a group of white, female Air Force officers defended their entitlement to violate Black women’s bodily autonomy by touching their hair. They used the same, “Well maybe I’ve never touched a Black girl’s hair before.” Like, why do you need to? How is touching a black woman’s hair going to impact your life’s purpose? There are quite a few places I’ve never put my fingers on a white woman, and I am happy to go my entire life without the experience. I suppose not much has changed from 1959 to 2018 regarding bodily entitlement.
The author would have never been privy to the conversations he had while hitch-hiking had he not been in Black skin. However, had he been raised as a Black person, he likely would have never chosen this travel option in the first place.
Black Like Me in Montgomery
The author gives a vague overview of general attitudes in Montgomery but doesn’t give specific reasons why it was his least favorite city. He cites how rude the white church ladies were when they saw him coming out of church. He ends up tapping out of his Black-facade and turning white again for the duration of his Montgomery stay. The privilege to take a break from being Black when being Black for 4 weeks gets overwhelming, triggered major side-eye from me.
I think of my grandmother who survived 30 years as a Black woman in Alabama before relocating to Kentucky for reprieve (consider the hostilities she endured if Kentucky was a reprieve to Alabama). I think of my father who didn’t get to tap out of being Black in Alabama for years as a child. What a freakin’ whimp, I reacted to the author.
Missed Opportunities in Black Like Me
Anyway, the author speaks of the shift from the welcoming embrace he experienced from Black people when they thought he was Black to the hesitancy and coldness he receives from them when he’s returned to whiteness.
He mentions the “hate stares” he gets from Black people when he goes strolling in their neighborhoods as a white man in Montgomery. White men have no reason to go into Black neighborhoods. They don’t have jobs there. They don’t have friends there. They don’t have shops there. I can’t help but conclude that the stares he got were not of hate, but of anxiety. He never acknowledges that his presence brought legitimate threats of violence.
On his hitch-hiking journey from Mobile to Montgomery, the author mentions that he came to expect sexual impropriety from the drivers who picked him up because it happened EVERY SINGLE TIME. This was only a short weekend of experiences for Griffin. After all that he went through as a Black man — to the point that he needed to turn white to get a break from it, the Black people were responding to the same traumas. Except their trauma was a lifetime’s worth. Not a few days.
It is no wonder that a young Black teen on the street would come to expect violence and hostility seeing a white man approach him after a lifetime of violent experiences. But the author doesn’t quite make that connection for readers when he sees the youth brace himself.
Instead, he writes about the way the races regard each other as a two-way street. However, responding to racism is not the same as racism. Responding to violence is not violence. It’s self-defense. It makes me wonder if that understanding escaped the author.
Other Shortcomings of Black Like Me
Let John H. Griffin tell it, life as an African-American in 1959 was nothing but strife, indignity, and navigating around white people. He left Texas looking for racism. I am not suggesting that his instances were not as evident as he wrote them, however, I think we’re also reading evidence of a Baader-Meinhof effect or “the yellow car phenomenon.” When you are looking for a yellow car you notice them more. When people become aware of something, they see it more frequently. He left Texas looking for racism and that is what he found. He went out of his way to put himself in situations to find it.
Clifton Taulbert published his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored in 1989. That book takes place in Mississippi during the same time Griffin was doing his journalism project. In his memoir, Taulbert showcases that even during perilous times, Black people experienced so much love within their tight-knit community. This community was lacking in Griffin’s research. He experienced some kindness when Black strangers welcomed him into their homes. But Griffin did not expand on this warmth and community in the way Taulbert did. Griffin didn’t even consider building community or focusing on the community of Black people in the different locations. His focus was on racism and he dubbed that focus “Negro Life.” There’s a lot more to being Black in America than the racist responses to Blackness. In fact, if he had community, he would never have been in some of those situations.
The Author’s Notable Observations
While I do think Griffin misses opportunities to bridge the gap of noticeable insights, he does highlight the threat of violence that was present for everyone in the Jim Crow South. The threat of white supremacist violence controlled the behavior of white people as well.
In his epilogue he explains, “Any white man who advocated justice in those days could be ruined by his white neighbors … Certainly, many who had a sense of justice did not dare show it for fear of reprisals. So no one was free…Heaped on top of the economic reprisals and the dangers of physical reprisal were perhaps the most damaging reprisal of all – the deliberate character assassination.”
(Black Like Me p. 164).
I did wonder if, while waxing philosophically in his reflections about the environment dictating the habits of people rather than racial pathology, he actually said these things to the white people in his audience at the time. Or did he acquiesce and allow their ignorance to continue?
Conclusions
As predicted, Griffin’s white neighbors responded to his newspaper column with death threats and lynching effigies. A mob of white men beat him and left him for dead after publication. It took Griffin five months to recover from the assault. His parents, wife, and kids fled to Mexico due to the violence.
What I haven’t read is how Black people received this work. I’m more interested in what Griffin’s Black contemporaries thought of his work. I’m curious to know Malcolm X’s thoughts on this project. Malcolm was an avid book nerd who was about 35-years-old at the time of publication. I wonder what Black college students thought about the work (which might not be too difficult to find by poking around the newspaper archives of HBCUs…will revisit this inquiry later). According to Smithsonian Magazine, Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) said, “is an excellent book—for whites.’ Griffin agreed; he eventually curtailed his lecturing on the book, finding it “absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own.” This is why I wonder why it took so long for him to figure this out.
I can’t say I’m super impressed. I don’t think it added anything unique to the Civil Rights/ Jim Crow narratives. Again, Black people already said everything he said. Overall, Black Like Me is an important read to spark conversations. I don’t think teachers without the intellectual range should touch this book, although I think it could be an insightful educational tool if done right.