Fifty years ago this spring, the white Texas writer John Howard Griffin became a national celebrity. Sepia, a prominent black magazine, published his “Journey Into Shame,” a series of articles about his daring travels through the Deep South. At midnight on November 7, 1959, after using pills, a sunlamp, and dye to darken his skin, Griffin had stepped out into the streets of New Orleans as a Negro to see what he would see.
Griffin lived as a black man for about three weeks, once finding respite in the home of a white editor and another time in a monastery. For another couple of weeks, after learning better how to manipulate his skin color, he sampled southern cities as alternately a black man and a white one.
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Rereading Black Like Me recently, I was surprised by how quick the trip was. Then again, when Christ died for our sins he was dead all of three days, and for 2,000 years that has been good enough for the Christian church. No one said Griffin’s immersion was too short to matter, though some black reviewers had reservations. For instance, Louis Lomax praised Black Like Me in the Saturday Review but commented, “As a Negro I was somewhat amused as Griffin eased from the white world into the black and encountered hostilities that have been my daily bread since childhood.” And the Negro Digest reviewer asserted that there was no way to “put a white man in a Negro’s place, for deep down, the white man understands that he is free.”
Buckley counseled patience. “The Negro community must advance, and is advancing,” he wrote, and his hope was simply “that when the Negroes have finally realized their long dream of attaining to the status of the white man, the white man will still be free.”
Griffin enlisted in the Army Air Forces and was sent to an island in the Solomons to study the local culture and measure the loyalty of the natives. These were people he thought of as primitives until he got to know them well enough to appreciate their sophisticated survival skills: even the five-year-olds knew how to negotiate jungles that made Griffin feel completely helpless.
In midlife Griffin converted to Catholicism. Deeply spiritual and intellectual, he was drawn to men like Jacques Maritain, the French philosopher, and Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and writer. When he contemplated becoming black, he judged himself harshly and concluded that love—be it of God, or justice, or humanity—was too weak a force in him to sustain him through such a trial. Instead, he yoked himself to a vow of obedience. My vow, he later told the astonished Maritain, was to you. Maritain held that existence lies in the act; Griffin swore to be worthy of his friend by acting “without ever thinking of the consequences.”
Griffin replied that there were many capable black men in the city, something he knew because he’d called some of them to find out what was going on in Rochester. He advised the white community leaders to invite them to the next meeting.
