Black Like Me (32 page)

- Cyril Connolly,
Sunday Times of London

Some actions are so absolutely simple and right that they amount to genius.
Black Like Me
was an act of genius on the part of Mr. Griffin
.

- Dan Wakefield,
New York Times Book Review

Griffin’s fully detailed journal of this odyssey is a brief, unsettling, and essential document of contemporary American life.

- San Francisco Chronicle

Black Like Me
is essential reading as a basic text for study of this great contemporary social problem. It is a social document of the first order, providing material absolutely unavailable elsewhere with such authenticity that it cannot be dismissed.

- New York Herald Tribune

His new book may serve as a corrective to the blindness of many of his countrymen.

- Newsweek

With this book, John Howard Griffin easily takes rank as probably the country’s most venturesome student of race relations. It is a piercing and memorable document.

- Saturxay Review of Literature

Black Like Me
is a moving and troubling book written by an accomplished novelist. It is a scathing indictment of our society.

- Dallas Morning News

A stinging indictment of thoughtless, needless inhumanity. No one can read it without suffering.

- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

One of the deepest, most penetrating documents yet set down on the racial question.

- Detroit News

Black Like Me
is gentle in tone, but it is more powerful and compelling than a sociological report, more penetrating than most scientific studies. It has the ring of authenticity.

- Commonweal

This is the pilgrimage par excellence of our time; the story of an incarnation made by one man, in deep reverence for the Divine Humanity that is daily insulted, buffeted, scourged, beaten and bled in every black man whites insult. Mr. Griffin’s heroic charity and courage are a glory for the church.

- Publishers Weekly

A shocker - the report of a white man who darkened his skin and lived as a Negro in the South to see the racial problem at first hand. This book will generate emotion.

- St. Petersburg Times

This is a shocking book, growing from the shock experienced by a white man who had the courage to find out for himself what it was like to be treated as a Negro. This is the human story … a book about simple justice. It suggests that any white man who thinks the Negro in the South is secure and contented should try being one.

- Negro Digest

It is an appalling report of man’s inhumanity - institutionalized and sactioned - to his fellow man. And, while it can only succeed in approximating the true horror of the Negro’s situation, the book should be must reading for all whites and for those numerous Negroes who like to pretend all’s right with the world.

- Cleveland Plain Dealer

Griffin’s theory is that much of the trouble in the South results from the fact that the public is not informed on the race question. Naturally our young people wonder what this visual social pattern we call the American way of life is all about. It seems to me that we should look upon this comedy of color with critical eyes.

—
The Washington Post
, 2007

What remains most important about “Black Like Me” is the force of the shock Griffin felt when he learned, in the most intimate ways, what it was — and for many still is — like to be black in America.…

Overall, though, the portrait that Griffin paints of the South is gloomy. Everywhere he went, “the criterion is nothing but the color of skin. My experience proved that. [Whites] judged me by no other quality. My skin was dark. That was sufficient reason for them to deny me those rights and freedoms without which life loses its significance and becomes a matter of little more than animal survival.” He became depressed, and his face lapsed into “the strained, disconsolate expression that is written on the countenance of so many Southern Negroes.” He “decided to try to pass back into white society” and scrubbed off the stain; immediately “I was once more a first-class citizen.” The knowledge gave him little joy.

A few months later, as his story became public, he was hanged in effigy in the Texas town where he lived with his wife and four children. They moved to Mexico for a while, then to Fort Worth. For the rest of his life he was an outspoken advocate of civil rights who had, as much as or more than any other white person in the country, earned his stripes. His influence is felt to this day through this remarkable book.