Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

  The local roadside café, a gathering place for the segregationists, had a new sign. For some time it had carried a sign reading WE DON’T SERVE NEGROES. Then it was replaced by a larger sign: WHITES ONLY. Now another had joined it: NO ALBINOS ALLOWED. This sign that so disgusted my parents greatly amused me. I was surprised and pleased to discover that Foy Curry, the café-owner, was, after all, a man of some wit.

  The principal point of contention among the women of the town appeared to be whether or not I had done a “Christian” thing. I feel that though few of them liked it, at least a large proportion of them understood that I worked as much for them and their children as I did for the Negroes. Certainly, my mail thus far was overwhelmingly congratulatory. I began to hope that I had been overly pessimistic, that we might be able to live in Mansfield in an atmosphere of peace and understanding after all.

  April 2

  The phone woke me in the morning. I glanced out our front window to a calm spring landscape of fields and woods, then picked up the phone. A long-distance call from the Star-Telegram in Fort Worth. What could they want? I wondered, since they had not carried one word about my story. The reporter came on the line. He cautiously asked me how things were.

  “All right as far as I know,” I said.

  “You don’t sound too excited,” he said. I began to feel uneasy.

  “Why should I be?”

  “You mean you haven’t heard?”

  “What?”

  “You were hanged in effigy from the center red-light wire downtown on Main Street this morning.”

  “In Mansfield,” I asked.

  “That’s right.” He told me that the Star-Telegram had received an anonymous call that racists had hanged my effigy on Main Street. The newspaper checked it out with the local constable who confirmed that a dummy, half black, half white, with my name on it and a yellow streak painted down its back, was hanging from the wire.

  “What would you like to say about it?” the reporter asked.

  “I’m sorry it happened,” I said. “It’ll only give the town a worse name.”

  “People seem pretty excited about what you’ve done. There’s a lot of loose talk out in Mansfield. Do you think this represents a real threat?”

  “I’d probably be the last to know,” I said.

  “Do you think your life’s in danger?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What are you going to do about this hanging?”

  “Ignore it.”

  “You’re not even going downtown to see it?”

  “No … this sort of thing is not interesting,” I said.

  “Do you think this represents the prevailing sentiment around town?”

  “No, I’m sure it doesn’t.”

  The reporter thanked me for my answers. He said they had sent a photographer out to take a picture of the effigy.

  The reporter called back. He wondered, as I did, how this could have happened on Main Street when we are supposed to have police on duty all night. He told me that a grocer saw the effigy around 5 A.M. when he came to work, called the constable and told him to “get that damned thing down from there.” The constable had taken it down and thrown it onto the town junk heap, but when the reporter and photographer got to Mansfield, someone had retrieved the effigy from the dump and hung it on a sign reading:

  $25 FINE FOR DUMPING DEAD ANIMALS

  The local people remained utterly silent. I waited for just one, anyone, to call and say: “We may not approve of your views, but we think this hanging is shameful.” Their silence was eloquent and devastating. My disappointment grew as the afternoon passed. Did their silence condone the lynching? My family’s uneasiness approached terror now. My parents and my wife’s mother begged us to take the children and go away somewhere until this thing blew over.

  That evening the Star-Telegram carried a six-column banner front-page headline announcing the lynching in effigy. Margaret Ann Turner (Mrs. Decherd Turner) had heard the news on TV and called from Dallas to say they were coming after the children. We telephoned the Joneses at Midlothian and then called the Turners back. Decherd said we must come and stay with them as long as there was the slightest danger. The Joneses also invited us, but they felt it might be better if we were in Dallas, since I had much support there, according to them.

  At such times, the slightest kindness on the part of anyone becomes a sort of bravery. My dad, who had gone to town, defiantly I imagine, returned almost jubilant. He had gone into the grocery store where he usually trades and heard the sudden silence. Then one of the owners, in the back at the meat counter, called a greeting.

  “I didn’t know whether I was still welcome,” Dad said.

  “Hell, you know better than that,” the grocer shouted.

  “I don’t know - the way people have been acting. I was afraid if they saw me coming into your store, they might stop trading here.”

  “That’s the kind of customer we don’t want in the first place,” the grocer said.

  In the context of the day, this was heroism. Someone in town dared to express an opinion.

  The time came to take my wife and children to Dallas. Decherd Turner had called again and told me to bring my typewriter and current work. “We’ve fixed you up an office here at the Bridwell Library,” he said, referring to the library of the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University.

  “I’m not going to do it. Somebody’s sure to find out and they’ll make a squawk about S.M.U. offering me protection. I’m too unpopular. I don’t want to get you or them into any uncomfortable situation.”

  Decherd insisted. He said they would be honored to offer me any hospitality and library or research facilities. They even requested I lecture to the student body.

  On my way out of the lane that leads from my parents’ place to my home, the neighbors at the halfway point waved, but those near the highway - people with whom we have been cordial - gave me the most violently hostile stare. I ran the gauntlet driving through town. At the second red light a truck pulled up beside me and a young man in a cowboy hat looked down into the cab of my car. He told me he’d heard talk that “they” were planning to come and castrate me, that the date had been set. He said this coldly, without emotion, neither threatening nor sympathetic, exactly the way one would say: “The weatherman’s promising rain for tomorrow.” I stared up at him, not recognizing him, and felt my face flush with the embarrassment of being a public spectacle. After he drove on, I felt sure he meant to imply that someone from out of town, not a local group, planned this.

  When I got home, the suitcases were packed. My wife’s mother said people in town thought the effigy-hanging was the work of “outsiders.” I told her I had no way of knowing but would certainly like to believe it.

  April 7 Dallas

  The Star-Teleg ram carried an excellent and accurate story as a follow-up to the effigy hanging. It made things clear, it clarified motives and it certainly lifted the entire matter above segregation and desegregation.

  Yet we learned that they burned a cross just above our house at the Negro school, and that someone remarked they should have burned it on my land. I wish they had, I wish they had - it would have been far better than burning it at the school.

  The Turners crowded us into their house. The relief to be there, surrounded by friends, away from the hostility and the threats of the bullies and the castraters, was so great that we were suddenly filled with exhaustion.

  April 11

  We returned to Mansfield, deciding to hide away no longer. The mail poured in, hearteningly favorable and moving. Most people in other areas, including the Deep South, understood, though the situation remained uncomfortable at home. Our townspeople wanted to “keep things peaceful” at all costs. They said I had “stirred things up.” This is laudable and tragic. I, too, say let us be peaceful; but the only way to do this is first to assure justice. By keeping “peaceful” in this instance, we end up consenting to the destruction of all peac
e - for so long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace, all trust in man’s good intentions toward his fellow man.

  June 19 Father’s Day

  There were six thousand letters to date and only nine of them were abusive. Many favorable letters came from Deep South states, from the whites. This confirmed my contention that the average Southern white is more properly disposed than he dares allow his neighbor to see, that he is more afraid of his fellow white racist than he is of the Negro.

  Justice Bok sent me a copy of his controversial speech at Radcliffe. He put it clearly:

  I am an Angry Old man about racial segregation. I live in a city where twenty-five percent of the population is Negro and I doubt that the percentage is much higher, except in spots, in the eleven Civil War States. I am angry at being told I cannot understand the problem. I do not believe that it takes a genius to pierce to the heart of a situation to which Southern chivalry once gave, among other things, the mulatto. The cry about lack of understanding and the need for time to work things out are only excuses to do little or nothing about them, and for almost a hundred years this served the South very well. … With all of the pious talk against communism, the present conflict over integration is doing the work of the communists almost better than they can do it themselves. This is to our shame when we should be sharpening and perfecting our procedures … it is only a mixture of ignorance and conceit that leads one section of the country to assume that no human beings on earth but themselves can understand the conditions under which they live.

  I am annoyed by those who love mankind but are cruel and discourteous to people.

  - Curtis Bok, Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, speech at Radcliffe College Commencement, 1960.

  I worked all afternoon and then went home and took a cold shower. Returning to my office in the evening, the desolation of a little town on a frightfully hot Sunday struck me. And it struck me, too, that no one there forgets, no one there forgives. I ran the lines of disapproval every time I drove through town to my office at the edge of the woods. This afternoon the town had been deserted except for the loafers who stood around the filling station and the street corners. All of them eyed me with animosity. Teenage boys in their jeans lounged against building fronts. They stared. One of the town’s citizens who had been cordial to me drove up and stopped beside me at the red light. I waved. He looked grimly away, not wanting the loungers to see him make a friendly gesture, not wanting them to carry tales. I smelled the sun-softened asphalt, smelled the summer odors of clover, swallowed the rebuff and drove on. But I found myself looking down the country lane that leads to the barn, checking to make certain no one’s car blocked the path.

  The lane was clear, but the neighbors were out in their yard. The woman stared hard at her feet. The husband lifted his head from weeding and glared at me as I drove past. I fixed my gaze on the sandy ruts and looked neither to right nor left. (I had tried nodding too many times.) In my rearview mirror, I saw them after I had passed, saw them stand like statues peering after me through the fog of pink dust raised by my wheels.

  August 14

  It was late in the afternoon of a cloudy, humid day. My parents, unable to bear the hostility, had sold their home and all their furniture and left for Mexico where they hoped to find a new life. We, too, were going, since we had decided that it was too great an injustice to our children to remain.

  But I felt I must remain a while longer, until the bullies had a chance to carry out their threats against me. I could not allow them to say they had “chased” me out. They had promised to fix me on July 15th, and now they said they would do it August 15th.

  Across the pastures, the incredible vulgarity of highly amplified hillbilly music drifted from the café on the highway. I sat in the barren studio where I had worked so many years, emptied now of all except the table and the typewriter and the bed, stripped of its sheets, with only the mattress ticking staring up at the ceiling. Empty bookshelves surrounded me. A few yards away, my parents’ house stood equally empty. I wandered back and forth from the barn to the house.

  August 17

  Istayed on, and the lane leading to my barn office remained empty. They did not come for me.

  I hired a Negro youth to come and help me clean up my parents’ house so it would be spotless for the new owners. The youth knew me and had no reticence in talking since he was sure I was “one of them” so to speak. Both Negroes and whites have gained this certainty from the experiment - because I was a Negro for six weeks, I remained partly Negro or perhaps essentially Negro.

  While we swept and burned old newspapers, we talked.

  “Why do whites hate us - we don’t hate them? he asked.

  We had a long conversation during which he brought out the obvious fact that whites teach their children to call them “niggers.” He said this happened to him all the time and that he would not even go into white neighborhoods because it sickened him to be called that. He said revealing things:

  “Your children don’t hate us, do they?”

  “God, no,” I said. “Children have to be taught that kind of filth. We’d never permit ours to learn it.”

  “Dr. Cook’s like that. His little girl called me nigger and he told her if he ever heard her say that again he’d spank her till she couldn’t sit down.”

  The Negro does not understand the white any more than the white understands the Negro. I was dismayed to see the extent to which this youth exaggerated - how could he do otherwise? - the feelings of the whites toward Negroes. He thought they all hated him.

  The most distressing repercussion of this lack of communication has been the rise in racism among Negroes, justified to some extent, but a grave symptom nonetheless. It only widens the gap that men of good will are trying desperately to bridge with understanding and compassion. It only strengthens the white racist’s cause. The Negro who turns now, in the moment of near- realization of his liberties, and bares his fangs at a man’s whiteness, makes the same tragic error the white racist has made.

  And this is happening on a wider scale. Too many of the more militant leaders are preaching Negro superiority. I pray that the Negro will not miss his chance to rise to greatness, to build from the strength gained through his past suffering and, above all, to rise beyond vengeance.

  If some spark does set the keg afire, it will be a senseless tragedy of ignorant against ignorant, injustice answering injustice - a holocaust that will drag down the innocent and right-thinking masses of human beings.

  Then we will all pay for not having cried for justice long ago.

  Epilogue 1976

  What’s Happened Since Black Like Me

  The experiment that led to writing Black Like Me was done at the very end of 1959, before the first “freedom rides” or any other manifestation of national concern about racial injustice. It was undertaken to discover if America was involved in the practice of racism against black Americans. Most white Americans denied any taint of racism and really believed that in this land we judged every man by his qualities as a human individual. In those days, any mention of racism brought to the public’s mind the Nazi suppression of Jewish people, the concentration camps, the gas chambers - and certainly, we protested, we were not like that.

  If we could not accept our somewhat different practice of racist suppression of black Americans, how could we ever hope to correct it? Our experience with the Nazis had shown one thing: where racism is practiced, it damages the whole community, not just the victim group.

  Were we racists or were we not? That was the important thing to discover. Black men told me that the only way a white man could hope to understand anything about this reality was to wake up some morning in a black man’s skin. I decided to try this in order to test this one thing. In order to make the test, I would alter my pigment and shave my head, but change nothing else about myself. I would keep my clothing, my speech patterns, my credentia
ls, and I would answer every question truthfully.

  Therefore, if we did, as we claimed, judge each man by his quality as a human individual, my life as a black John Howard Griffin would not be greatly changed, since I was that same human individual, altered only in appearance.

  If, on the other hand, we looked at men, saw the mark of pigment, applied all the false “racial and ethnic characteristics,” then since I bore that mark, my life would be changed in ways I could not anticipate.

  I learned within a very few hours that no one was judging me by my qualities as a human individual and everyone was judging me by my pigment. As soon as white men or women saw me, they automatically assumed I possessed a whole set of false characteristics (false not only to me but to all black men). They could not see me or any other black man as a human individual because they buried us under the garbage of their stereotyped view of us. They saw us as “different” from themselves in fundamental ways: we were irresponsible; we were different in our sexual morals; we were intellectually limited; we had a God-given sense of rhythm; we were lazy and happy-go-lucky; we loved watermelon and fried chicken. How could white men ever really know black men if on every contact the white man’s stereotyped view of the black man got in the way? I never knew a black man who felt this stereotyped view fit him. Always, in every encounter even with “good whites,” we had the feeling that the white person was not talking with us but with his image of us.

  “But,” white men would protest, “they really are like that. I’ve known hundreds of them and they’re all the same.” White men would claim black men were really happy; they liked it that way.

  And in a sense, such white men had good evidence for these claims, because if black men did not, in those days, play the stereotyped role of the “good Negro,” if he did not do his yessing and grinning and act out the stereotyped image, then he was immediately considered a “bad Negro,” called “uppity, smart-alecky, arrogant,” and he could lose his job, be attacked, driven away.