An adventurous man, Griffin makes his way throughout the South, eventually visiting Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia before returning home as a white man and enduring threats from racists who want to harm him for “stir” things up.

Before long, his skin is dark enough that he can pose as a black man, and he begins going around the city, speaking to black people, trying to find decent hotels, and enduring constant racism. Griffin consults a dermatologist in the city, and the doctor gives him medication that will darken his pigmentation. Setting off from his home in Mansfield, Texas-and leaving behind his wife and small children-Griffin goes to New Orleans, where he stays with a friend without telling him what, exactly, he’s doing (he does this because he wants to protect this companion from any negativity that might come his way as a result of the project).

Although Levitan thinks the idea is crazy, he agrees to pay for Griffin’s expenses in return for a number of articles about the experience. A religious man and an active journalist, Griffin turns to George Levitan, the editor of Sepia magazine, for help with his endeavor. Today, sixty years after Griffin's extraordinary journey across the racial divide, Black Like Me's unrepeatable act of journalistic intrepidity stands as a fascinating document of its times.The author and protagonist of Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin is a white journalist who disguises himself as a black man to understand the experience of African Americans in the South during the late 1950s. Selling over five million copies, Black Like Me became one of the best-known accounts of race and racism in the 1960s, and helped turn the eyes of white society towards the everyday indignities and injustices of segregation. Originally commissioned by the African-American general-interest magazine Sepia under the title 'Journey into Shame', it was published in book form in 1961, revealing to a white audience the day-to-day experience of racism in segregation-era America. Black Like Me is Griffin's own account of his journey. In the autumn of 1959, a white Texan journalist named John Howard Griffin travelled across the Deep South of the United States disguised as a black man. The classic account of a white reporter's journey across the racial divide in 1950s America, reissued for the 60th anniversary of the events with a new foreword by Bernardine Evaristo.

Black like me by john howard griffin