Texas Originals

John Howard Griffin

June 16, 1920–September 9, 1980

In 1961, author John Howard Griffin published an account of a six-week journey through the American South. He called the book an "obscure work," likely to interest only sociologists.

But the book—Black Like Me—became a modern classic.

Born in 1920, Griffin grew up in Fort Worth. At fifteen, he moved to France, where he attended school and studied music and photography. He served in the French Resistance before returning home in 1941 and enlisting in the Army Air Corps.

In the fifties, Griffin became increasingly troubled by racial discrimination and sought to better understand the plight of Black people in America. He later wrote, "The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us was to become a Negro."

Griffin consulted with a dermatologist to darken his skin and soon began traveling southern states passing as Black. In Black Like Me, he chronicles the indignities he suffered, offering readers a troubling view of racial dynamics in the Jim Crow South.

The New York Times hailed the book as "an essential document of contemporary American life." But it also triggered immense hostility. At one point Griffin and his family moved to Mexico, fearing for their safety.

Griffin devoted the rest of his life to promoting social justice—teaching, delivering lectures, and working with civil rights leaders. He died in 1980.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, critical response to Griffin’s book in the early sixties divided along racial lines. White critics such as Dan Wakefield of the New York Times lauded Griffin’s endeavor as courageous and enlightening, asserting that "[Black Like Me] provides a good beginning toward that essential understanding" of the daily indignities of living as a Black person in America. By contrast, Black critics often noted that Black Like Me only confirmed racial dynamics that Black people had described for years, and that response to the book suggested a tendency among white people to discount the credibility of black peoples’ accounts of their own experiences. A reviewer for Negro Digest had a genuinely mixed response to Griffin’s work, writing that Griffin’s empathy "however sharp or genuine or sincere, cannot put [him fully] in the Negro’s place for, deep down, the white man understands that he is free and the rules governing the Negro’s life simply do not apply to him." However, the critic acknowledged Griffin’s ability to effectively communicate the degradation and anguish of African American life to white readers.

In 2011, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Black Like Me, Smithsonian featured an article revisiting the book and its legacy. Modern scholars of African American history and American race relations, including Gerald Early and Nell Irvin Painter, consider Griffin’s book within the context of a post-Civil Rights Movement America.

Also in 2011, San Antonio’s Wings Press released a fiftieth anniversary edition of Black Like Me as well as a new collection of Griffin’s later essays on spirituality and racism, Prison of Culture: Beyond Black Like Me. This edition includes a new foreword by Studs Terkel, Griffin’s longtime colleague and friend, and an afterword by Robert Bonazzi, Griffin’s authorized biographer. Unique to the Wings Press editions, Don Rutledge’s photographs of Griffin disguised as a Black man in New Orleans provide historical context.

The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin holds a collection of Griffin’s papers. The collection includes photocopies of two versions of Black Like Me in manuscript, an essay entitled "Publication Year" and correspondence to and from Griffin. Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library also contains a collection of Griffin’s papers.

Selected Bibliography

Bonazzi, Robert. Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997.

Bonazzi, Robert. The Reluctant Activist: The Spiritual Life and Art of John Howard Griffin. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2018.

Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me (1962). San Antonio: Wings Press, 2011.

Ladaga, Lydia. "Black Like Me Celebrates 40th Anniversary." CNN, January 11, 2001.

Sharpe, Ernest, Jr. "The Man Who Changed His Skin." American Heritage 40, no. 1 (February 1989).

Wakefield, Dan. "Traveling Second Class." The New York Times, October 22, 1961. 

Watson, Bruce. "Black Like Me, 50 Years Later." Smithsonian Magazine, October 2011.

Yardley, Jonathan. "John Howard Griffin Took Race All the Way to the Finish." Washington Post, March 17, 2007. 

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John Howard Griffin holds a Fort Worth Star-Telegram that shows an effigy someone hung of him. Courtesy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Library, Arlington, Texas.

Cover of Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, originally published in 1961.