John Howard Griffin ( – ) 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.
John Howard Griffin (born , Dallas, Texas, U.S.—died , Fort Worth) was a white American author who temporarily altered the pigment of his skin in order to experience firsthand the life of a black man in the South. Griffin described his experience of racism in the best seller Black like Me (1961). The book—which detailed countless incidents of hatred, suspicion ...
Black Like Me, 50 Years Later John Howard Griffin gave readers an unflinching view of the Jim Crow South. How has his book held up?
It was blindness that inspired John Howard Griffin, a white author and journalist from Dallas, Texas, to write about color in the United States. In 1956, Griffin, blind at the time, sat in on a panel discussion in Mansfield, Texas about desegregation. Unable to tell the speakers’ races from their voices, Griffin began to see color anew.
What John Howard Griffin discovered would shake America to its core and become one of the most controversial social experiments in history. His journey was dangerous, enlightening, and would change how millions of Americans understood racism.
John Howard Griffin was born on 16 June 1920 in Dallas, Texas, to John Walter Griffin and Lena May Young. His mother, a gifted classical pianist, nurtured in him a love of music that would shape much of his early life.