30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story that Exposed the Jim Crow South by Bill Steigerwald
30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story that Exposed the Jim Crow South by Bill Steigerwald
In 1948, most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the ten million African Americans living in the South. Then Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover as a black man in the Deep South. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at "the iniquitous Jim Crow system" shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national media debate about ending America's system of apartheid.
Escorted through the South's parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers and doctors. Sprigle's impassioned series for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country's leading black paper.
Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffin's similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigle's intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the Jim Crow South. Author Bill Steigerwald elevates Sprigle's groundbreaking expose to its rightful place among the seminal events of the early Civil Rights movement.
Lyons Press, Hardcover, 2017
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.