American journalist (1920?1980)
John Howard Griffin
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Born
| (
1920-06-16
)
June 16, 1920
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Died
| September 9, 1980
(1980-09-09)
(aged 60)
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Education
| University of Poitiers
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Occupation
| Writer
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Notable credit
| Black Like Me
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Political party
| Democratic
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Spouse
|
Elizabeth Ann Holland
(
m.
1953)
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Children
| 4
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John Howard Griffin
(June 16, 1920 ? September 9, 1980) was an American journalist and author from
Texas
who wrote about and championed racial equality. He is best known for his 1959 project to temporarily pass as a black man and journey through the
Deep South
in order to see life and
segregation
from the other side of the
color line
first-hand. He first published a series of articles on his experience in
Sepia
magazine
, which had underwritten the project, then later published an expanded account in book form, under the title
Black Like Me
(1961). This was later adapted into a
1964 film of the same name
. A 50th anniversary edition of the book was published in 2011 by Wings Press.
[1]
Early life
[
edit
]
Griffin was born in 1920 in
Dallas, Texas
, to John Walter Griffin and Lena May Young.
[2]
His mother was a classical pianist, and Griffin acquired his love of music from her. Awarded a musical scholarship, he went to
France
to study
French language
and literature at the
University of Poitiers
and medicine at the Ecole de Medecine. At 19, he joined the
French Resistance
as a medic, working at the Atlantic seaport of
Saint-Nazaire
, where he helped smuggle
Austrian Jews
to safety and freedom in England.
[3]
Griffin returned to the United States and enlisted, serving 39 months in the
United States Army Air Forces
stationed in the
South Pacific
, during which he was decorated for bravery. He spent 1943?44 as the only European-American on Nuni, one of the
Solomon Islands
, where he was assigned to study the local culture. He had a bout with spinal
malaria
that left him temporarily
paraplegic
.
[3]
During this year, Griffin married an island woman.
[2]
In 1946, he went slowly blind, the after effect of a severe concussion that he had received from a Japanese bomb.
[4]
He would remain blind until inexplicably regaining his sight in 1957.
[5]
He returned home to Texas without his wife and converted to
Catholicism
in 1952, becoming a
Lay Carmelite
. He taught piano. He gained
dispensation from the Vatican
for a second marriage. He married one of his students, Elizabeth Ann Holland, and they had four children.
[
citation needed
]
In 1952, he published his first novel,
The Devil Rides Outside,
a mystery set in a monastery in postwar France, where a young American composer goes to study
Gregorian chant
.
[6]
During the 1940s and 1950s, Griffin wrote a number of essays about his loss of sight and his life, followed by his spontaneous return of sight in 1957.
[7]
At that point he began to develop as a photographer.
He published
Nuni
(1956), a semi-autobiographical novel drawing from his year "marooned" in the
Solomon Islands
. It shows his developing interest in
ethnography
. He conducted a kind of social study in his 1959 project, resulting in his book
Black Like Me
(1961).
[3]
Black Like Me
[
edit
]
In the fall of 1959, Griffin decided to investigate firsthand the plight of African Americans in the
South
, where racial segregation was legal; blacks
had been disenfranchised
since the turn of the century and closed out of the political system, and whites were struggling to maintain dominance against an increasing
civil rights movement
.
Griffin consulted a
New Orleans
dermatologist for aid in darkening his skin, being treated with a course of drugs, sunlamp treatments, and skin creams. Griffin shaved his head in order to hide his straight hair. He spent six weeks travelling as a black man in New Orleans and parts of
Mississippi
(with side trips to
South Carolina
and
Georgia
), getting around mainly by bus and by hitchhiking. He was later accompanied by a photographer who documented the trip, and the project was underwritten by
Sepia
magazine, in exchange for first publication rights for the articles he planned to write. These were published under the title
Journey into Shame.
When he decided to end his journey, in
Montgomery, Alabama
, he spent three days secluded in a hotel room to avoid the sunlight and stopped taking his skin-darkening medication.
[8]
Griffin published an expanded version of his project as
Black Like Me
(1961), which became a best seller in 1961. He described in detail the problems an African American encountered in the segregated
Deep South
meeting the needs for food, shelter, and toilet and other sanitary facilities. Griffin also described the hatred he often felt from white Southerners he encountered in his daily life?shop clerks, ticket sellers, bus drivers, and others. He was particularly shocked by the curiosity white men displayed about his sexual life. He also included anecdotes about white Southerners who were friendly and helpful.
[3]
The wide publicity about the book made Griffin a national celebrity for a time. The book had several editions. In a 1975 essay included in later editions of the book, Griffin recalled encountering hostility and threats to him and his family in his hometown of
Mansfield, Texas
. Someone hanged his figure in effigy. He eventually moved his family to Mexico for about nine months before they returned to
Fort Worth
.
[3]
[9]
The book was adapted as a
1964 film of the same name
, starring
James Whitmore
as Griffin, and featuring
Roscoe Lee Browne
,
Clifton James
and
Will Geer
. A 50th anniversary edition of the book was published in 2011 by Wings Press.
[1]
Later life
[
edit
]
Griffin continued to lecture and write on
race relations
and
social justice
during the early years of the
Civil Rights Movement
. In 1964, he received the
Pacem in Terris Award
from the Davenport (Iowa) Catholic Interracial Council for his contributions to racial understanding. In 1975, Griffin was severely beaten by the
Ku Klux Klan
, but survived.
[10]
In his later years, Griffin focused on researching his friend
Thomas Merton
, an American
Trappist
monk and spiritual writer whom he first met in 1962. Griffin was chosen by Merton's estate to write the authorized biography of Merton, but his health (he had been diagnosed with
type 2 diabetes
) prevented him from completing this project. He concentrated on Merton's later years.
Death
[
edit
]
Griffin died in Fort Worth, Texas, on September 9, 1980, at the age of 60, from complications of
diabetes
.
[11]
He was survived by his wife Elizabeth Ann Griffin and children. He was buried in the cemetery in his birthplace of Mansfield, Texas. After her death, Elizabeth was also buried there, although she had remarried.
There have been persistent rumors that Griffin died of skin cancer, which purportedly developed from his use of large doses of
methoxsalen (
Oxsoralen
)
in 1959 to darken his skin for his race project. Griffin did not have skin cancer but he did experience temporary and minor symptoms from taking the drug, especially
fatigue
and
nausea
.
[11]
Legacy
[
edit
]
Posthumous works
[
edit
]
Griffin's nearly finished portion of the biography of Thomas Merton, which covered Merton's later years, was posthumously published in paperback by Latitude Press in 1983 as
Follow the Ecstasy: Thomas Merton, the Hermitage Years, 1965?1968.
[12]
Griffin's essays about his blindness and recovery were collected and published posthumously as
Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision
(2004).
[13]
In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the publication of
Black Like Me,
Wings Press published a new edition. It also published updated editions of Griffin's other works, including his first novel,
The Devil Rides Outside.
Secondary studies
[
edit
]
- Robert Bonazzi wrote a biographical memoir of Griffin:
Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me
(1997). Bonazzi had published other works by Griffin at his Latitudes Press. In 2018, TCU Press published Bonazzi's
Reluctant Activist: The Spiritual Life and Art of John Howard Griffin
.
- Uncommon Vision: The Life and Times of John Howard Griffin
is a film documentary released in 2011 in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of his influential book. Directed and produced by Morgan Atkinson, it was aired on PBS stations. The film is also included as an extra on the 2013
DVD
release of the film
Black Like Me
.
[14]
Works
[
edit
]
- The Devil Rides Outside
(1952)
- Nuni
(1956)
- Land of the High Sky
(1959)
- Black Like Me
(1961)
- The Church and the Black Man
(1969)
- A Hidden Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton
(1970)
- Twelve Photographic Portraits
(1973)
- Jacques Maritain: Homage in Words and Pictures
(1974)
- A Time to be Human
(1977)
- The Hermitage Journals: A Diary Kept While Working on the Biography of Thomas Merton
(1981)
- Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision
(2004), posthumous collection of essays from the 1940s and 1950s
- Available Light: Exile in Mexico
(2008) Autobiographic texts of the period he writes the essay 'black like me'
Parallel exercises
[
edit
]
- Ray Sprigle
, a Pulitzer Prize-winning white journalist from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, disguised himself in 1948 as a black man and traveled in the
Deep South
for a month with prominent black Atlanta political leader
John Wesley Dobbs
, a guide and host provided by the
NAACP
. Sprigle wrote a 21-part nationally syndicated series of articles under the title "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" that formed the basis of Sprigle's 1949 book
In the Land of
Jim Crow
.
30 Days a Black Man
(Lyons Press, 2017) by journalist Bill Steigerwald details Sprigle's undercover mission and the stir it created in the media in 1948.
- Grace Halsell
, a white female journalist, also Texan, who, inspired by Griffin, disguised herself as black in a similar manner. Shortly after the April 1968
assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
, she left her position on President
Lyndon B. Johnson
's White House staff for the journey she described as "embracing the Other". She published her account the next year as
Soul Sister: The Story of a White Woman Who Turned Herself Black and Went to Live and Work in Harlem and Mississippi
. She undertook many similar immersive disguises throughout her career.
- Gunter Wallraff
, a white German
undercover journalist
who often immersed himself in parts to reveal the treatment of others (an alcoholic, a worker in a chemicals factory, a homeless person), and released the 2009 documentary
Black on White
, showing how he was treated in Germany while undercover as a black man.
References
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
Sarfraz Manzoor, "Rereading: Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin"
,
The Guardian,
27 October 2011, accessed 2 May 2016
- ^
a
b
Article about Griffin
, tshaonline.org; accessed October 5, 2015.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
Kevin Connolly (October 25, 2009),
Exposing the colour of prejudice
,
BBC News
- ^
Robert Bonazzi,
Reluctant Activist: The Spiritual Life and Art of John Howard Griffin
, TCU Press, 2018, pp. 43-44.
- ^
Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi, Texas State Historical Association, January 1, 1995,
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/griffin-john-howard
- ^
Enda McAteer, "Review: 'The Devil Rides Outside' "
, 23 March 2014, Catholic Fiction website, accessed 2 May 2016
- ^
Focus Newman,
University of New Mexico, Vol. 8, No. 1, October 1964.
- ^
Robert Bonazzi (1997),
Man in the Mirror
, p. 106
- ^
Jonathan Yardley (March 17, 2007),
"John Howard Griffin Took Race All the Way to the Finish"
,
Washington Post
- ^
"Black Like Me: Biography: John Howard Griffint | Novelguide"
.
www.novelguide.com
. Archived from
the original
on 2015-01-09.
- ^
a
b
"Dispute of the belief that Griffin died from his skin darkening treatments true"
,
Snopes.com
- ^
John Howard Griffin,
Follow the Ecstasy: Thomas Merton, the Hermitage Years, 1965?1968,
ed. Robert Bonazzi, Latitude Press, 1983
- ^
Sue Ann Gardner, "Review of
Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision
by John Howard Griffin;" Orbis, 2004
,
MultiCultural Review
(Spring 2005) v. 14, no. 1: 71?72
- ^
"DVD Release:
Black Like Me
"
, retrieved 2-13-2013.
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Bonazzi, Robert (1997).
Man in the mirror : John Howard Griffin and the story of Black like me
. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books.
ISBN
978-1-60940-137-5
.
OCLC
676697411
.
- Bonazzi, Robert (2018).
Reluctant activist : the spiritual life and art of John Howard Griffin
. Fort Worth, Texas.
ISBN
978-0-87565-666-3
.
OCLC
985603939
.
{{
cite book
}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (
link
)
- Wald, Gayle (2000).
Crossing the line : racial passing in twentieth-century U.S. literature and culture
. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.
ISBN
0-8223-8092-7
.
OCLC
55500925
.
External links
[
edit
]
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1960s
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1990s
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2020s
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International
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