The place of Black Like Me in the canon of literature about the African-American experience is problematic. For some, this book has more in common with Uncle Tom's Cabin than with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Richard Wright's Native Son, or James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. Despite the title, the intended audience for Black Like Me wasn't blacks; rather it was written for whites, as it is the story of a white southerner who, in 1959, with pills from a dermatologist and ultraviolet light, darkened his skin so he could try to understand what life was like for blacks.

Just as a century earlier, Harriett Beecher Stowe had wanted to turn attention to the cruelty of slavery. Griffin's hope was that whites who read his book would better understand the inequities of Jim Crow laws. The 1961 book (and 1964 movie of the same name) received generous coverage in the popular African-American press, in magazines such as Sepia and Ebony. However, some black activists saw Griffin's book as distilling the black experience into a liberal white perspective. In his autobiography, Malcolm X wrote about Griffin's experiment: "Well, if it was a frightening experience for him as nothing but a make-believe Negro for 60 days--then you think about what real Negroes in America have gone through for 400 years." (379)

From a privileged point of view four decades hence, parts of Black Like Me can grate on the ears like a quickly drawn travelogue that seeks to encapsulate, in a few pages, the truths of a civilization. Of his experiences riding a bus through deep Mississippi, Griffin writes how blacks here encourage one another:

Whereas in New Orleans he paid little attention to his brother, in Mississippi everyone who boarded the bus at the various little towns had a smile and a greeting for everybody else. We felt strongly the need to establish friendship as a buffer against the invisible threat. Like shipwrecked people, we huddled together in a warmth and courtesy that was pure and pathetic. (64)

For some, Black Like Me might read too much like Forest Gump, with Griffin as a white voice of conscience popping up in the zeitgeist of the late '50s, early '60s African-American experience--be it listening to reactions to a lynching in Poplarville, Mississippi, or observing the careful maneuverings of blacks led by Reverend King in Montgomery, Alabama. But, there is much to reward the reader in Griffin's book--an analogy with Stowe's work is again appropriate. Today, even those chagrined at some of the depictions in Uncle Tom's Cabin still study that work. First, Stowe's book is historically important and arguably the most influential 19th century book in this country. But, Stowe's book also offers a valuable look at the black experience from the perspective of an Anglo author questioning the status quo and seeking justice. It is the same with Black Like Me.

The structure of Black Like Me is simple. The reader follows Griffin on a series of bus rides, hitchhiking adventures, and excursions into the black sections of southern towns that are punctuated by occasional retreats into the material comforts of homes of liberal white friends or religious sanctuaries. Along the way, Griffin's text offers a commentary on the seminal experiences facing African Americans in the South then: employment that earns them little, Jim Crow laws, the threat of lynching or other violence, and segregation.

Part of Griffin's plan was to show whites the results of the unofficial apartheid in America that remained--and even seemed to solidify--after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling. Griffin writes of the small but humiliating obstacles in everyday life. For example, he spends much of his time looking for "a place to eat, or somewhere to find a drink of water, a restroom, somewhere to wash my hands." (99) At a rest stop in Mississippi, the white bus driver doesn't allow the black passengers to get off to use the restroom. Griffin writes: "I sat in the monochrome gloom of dusk, scarcely believing that in this year of freedom, any man could deprive another of anything so basic as the need to quench thirst or use the rest room." (63)

Another incident describes how, as the bus circles through the town of Poplarville, Mississippi, the blacks at the back of the bus speak in low voices about the recent lynching there of Mac Charles Parker, who was dragged from his cell and pulled feet-first down the stairs so his head bumped against each step. (65-66; see 49-52) Or, on a bus ride through Alabama and Georgia, Griffin faces the question of whether to give up his seat. Two white women board, and, after "no gallant southern white man (or youth) rose to offer them a place in the ‘white section.'" (128) The blacks are expected to move farther to the back to make way for the women and a war of nerves rises between the blacks and whites on the bus. (128) Griffin has already learned from fellow bus passengers not to give in--the thinking is: "If the whites would not sit with us, let them stand." (25)

If part of his intention was to show the struggles and indignities that blacks faced, Griffin also makes a point of showing that, seen up close, African Americans can be trusted. As a black person, he receives only an occasional kindness from whites. Too often, if a white person talks to him, the conversation turns to curiosity about the purported sexual prowess of black men or to veiled threats should Griffin get out of line. But Griffin receives hospitality from blacks, even those who have little money of their own. At one point while hitchhiking between Mobile and Montgomery, he is picked up by a young black man, who offers him sleeping space on the floor of the two-bedroom house he shares with his wife and their six children. Here, Griffin also finds an opportunity to comment on the economic system:

As we drove several miles down a lane into the forest, he told me he was a sawmill worker and never made quite enough to get out from under his debts. Always, when he took his check to the store, he owed a little more than the check would cover. He said it was the same for everyone else; and indeed, I have seen the pattern throughout my travels. Part of the southern white's strategy is to get the Negro in debt and keep him there. (107)

Griffin concludes that, were the inequities between them erased, blacks and whites would find that they have much in common. Citing sociological treatises, he assures readers that "the contemporary middle-class Negro has the same family cult, the same ideals and goals as his white counterpart." (114)

The reader cannot mistake Griffin's sincerity. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, he wrote under the influence of deep religious convictions. Among his friends, were the theologian Jacques Maritain and priest and writer Thomas Merton. Later in life, he wrote several books on Merton and put together a collection of Merton's photography. (Griffin had introduced Merton to photography.)

In Black Like Me, Griffin is also honest about the hypocrisy of some of those who attend church. In Montgomery, Alabama, he experiments by dressing up and walking past churches as white people file out of Sunday morning services. There, he is met by hostile stares. (120) But, Griffin also had glimpsed in religion the possibility of a common humanity among different peoples. The title for the book comes from a poem by Langston Hughes. In that poem, Hughes finds validation in nature, which favors no skin color. Walking the streets of Selma, Alabama, Griffin finds, in darkness, a time of safety for the African American, as well as validation by both nature and God:

Most of the whites were in their homes. The threat was less.... At such a time, the Negro can look at the starlit skies and find that he has, after all, a place in the universal order of things. The stars, the black skies affirm his humanity, his validity as a human being. He knows that his belly, his lungs, his tired legs, his appetites, his prayers, and his mind are cherished in some profound involvement with nature and God. The night is his consolation. It does not despise him. (118)

You can teach students about Black Like Me using several approaches. You could have students examine the civil rights issues Griffin raises. Or, they could compare two months of Griffin's experiences as a black person with the works of African-American writers. Or, they could look at how Griffin and other Anglo writers approached issues of segregation.

James Agee

James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is rich in its depictions of a well-meaning author trying to bridge, not only social classes, but also racial divisions. The work was a collaboration between Agee and Walker Evans, a photographer for the Farm Security Administration. Fresh journalistic attention had been brought to the South by the FSA, along with the Federal Writers Project, which had included these African Americans: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others.

These projects and the larger cultural milieu of the time had brought different classes of people together. Agee, and, even more so, Evans, came from privileged backgrounds. While his family did not have much money, Agee had attended a private, parochial school, and his talent provided him entry into Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University. When he was researching what would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he was working for Fortune magazine.

Indeed, Agee appears ill at ease when around the poor Alabama families. He writes of a white landlord having three black man in their 30s sing songs for Agee and Evans. Agee writes of his inability to communicate with the three men:

Meanwhile, and during all this singing, I had been sick in the knowledge that they felt they were here at our demand, mine and Walker's, and I could communicate nothing otherwise; and now, in a perversion of self-torture, I played my part through. I gave their leader 50 cents, trying at the same time, through my eyes, to communicate much more, and said I was sorry we had held them up and that I hoped they would not be late; and he thanked me for them in a dead voice, not looking me in the eye, and they went away, putting their white hats on their heads as they walked into the sunlight. (31)

Agee's uneasy feeling is similar to the embarrassment the young George Orwell experienced in Burma, which he best captured in his essay, "Shooting An Elephant." He, too, realized a gulf existed between him and the people of the country, no matter what his good intentions were. In the story, the British policeman feels he must shoot a magnificent creature because it is the only way he can communicate his authority to the native people.

Orwell eventually quit his job and vowed to become one of the working class. Agee was less successful than Orwell in becoming "proletarian." In writing about the Ricketts, Gudgers, and Woods, the pseudonyms for the three white sharecropper families with whom he and Evans stayed, Agee confesses that all he can accomplish is "relative truth." (239) He writes:

George Gudger is a man, et cetera. But obviously, in the effort to tell of him (by example) as truthfully as I can, I am limited. I know him only so far as I know him, and only in those terms in which I know him; and all of that depends as fully on who I am as on who he is. (239)

In contrast to the sharecroppers' simple toils and honest feelings, Agee seems to say, "I'm not certain I am getting this right." He knows the works that will not convey what he has seen and heard. Certainly, the political writing of the 1930s would not. It poisons "the air against good writing" and "the development of ferocity in personal integrity." (356) Nor can the usual journalism with its formulas convey what he has seen and heard:

Who, what, where, when, and why (or how) is the primal cliché and complacency of journalism: but I do not wish to appear to speak favorably of journalism. I have never yet seen a piece of journalism which conveyed more than the slightest fraction of what any even moderately reflective and sensitive person would mean and intend by those unachievable words, and that fraction itself I have never seen clean of one or another degree of patent, to say nothing of essential, falsehood. (234)

Instead, he felt that writers should strive to describe their subjects' "intrinsic beauty and stature." (239) The natural question, though, is how Agee can reject both neutral journalism and partisan reporting. His answer is that the good writer--the writer interested in conveying the people around him--will become like a poet. Agee, like a poet, will try to appreciate the person Gudger is, and to that degree, reproduce Gudger in words. So, Agee catalogues the items in the family's cabin, the clothes they wear, and the work they do; then he asks readers to draw their own conclusions (as the reader of a poem pieces images together).

Agee is at one end of the range of white writers who dealt with segregation. Both he and Griffin used the same journalistic approach: an immersion journalism, in which a writer lives for a time with the subjects of his or her stories. But, Agee chose to live with white sharecropping families--African Americans are only tangential in his writings, and his perspective is as much poetic as political. Griffin, on the other hand, chose to immerse himself in the world African Americans lived in, with whites hovering around the perimeter in his book. Moreover, Griffin's intent is decidedly political.

Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, (1941), 1960. Paperback, 1980.

Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. New York: Signet, (1961), 1996.

Orwell, George. "Shooting An Elephant." An Age Like This, 1920-1940, vol. 1 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt, 1968.

Orwell's essay is also available in other collections of Orwell's writings and in general literary anthologies.

Other Works Cited

Haley, Alex and Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Rpt. New York: Ballantine, 1992.

Huey, Gary. Rebel With A Cause: P. D. East, Southern Liberalism and the Civil Rights Movement. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1985.

Lynchings

Allen, James, ed. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. n.p. Twin Palms Publishers, 2000.

Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002.

Smead, Howard. Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

The Southern Press and Jim Crow

Davies, David R., ed. The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Kneebone, John T. Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Waldron, Ann. Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 1993.

Whalen, John. Maverick Among the Magnolias: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Xlibris Corp, 2002.

Other

Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Marshall N. Surratt is an English and journalism teacher in Plano, Texas.

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