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30 Days a Black Man
The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South
1 of 1 copy available
Escorted through the South's parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic 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.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter's series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country's leading black paper. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at "the iniquitous Jim Crow system" shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America's system of apartheid.
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 South.
Author Bill Steigerwald elevates Sprigle's groundbreaking exposé to its rightful place among the seminal events of the early Civil Rights movement.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 1, 2017 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781493026197
- File size: 2928 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781493026197
- File size: 2928 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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March 1, 2017
Fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure.Longtime journalist Steigerwald (Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about Travels with Charley, 2012, etc.) offers a valuable corrective in resurrecting Ray Sprigle (1886-1957), an old-school white Pittsburgh newspaperman who produced an expose after traveling the South disguised as a black man. As Juan Williams notes in his foreword, "over thirty days, Sprigle learned of the daily humiliations experienced by blacks in the 1948 Deep South." Before he details Sprigle's tense journey, Steigerwald strongly depicts the pre-civil rights landscape, arguing that most white Americans could ignore blacks' plight, and some enforced the color line. He focuses on once-prominent figures, including the NAACP's driven head Walter Francis White (who actually appeared white), so-called "progressive segregationists" like journalist Hodding Carter, and determined middle-class blacks like John Wesley Dobbs, a Masonic Grand Master (and passionate Atlanta booster despite its segregation) recruited by White to guide Sprigle. He portrays Atlanta and Pittsburgh as cities in their primes, vastly different for black and white citizens, as was the country overall in 1948: "Civil rights and desegregation were in the headlines every day." Sprigle, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Ku Klux Klan associations of Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, was described by Time as "a hard-digging, hell-for-leather newsman." Passing as a black man with a deep suntan and workman's clothes, after learning that dyes would be toxic, Sprigle traveled through several states, from Atlanta to the Mississippi Delta, and avoided danger due to Dobbs' counsel: "to stay out of trouble and avoid harm you had to be vigilant as well as meek, lowly, and docile. His newspaper stories were carried nationwide and turned into a book, yet Steigerwald concludes, "by Christmas of 1948, the intense debate over the future of Jim Crow segregation had burned out in the national media." Sprigle's audacity was forgotten, but Steigerwald turns it into rollicking, haunting American history.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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