John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin (June 16, 1920 – September 9, 1980) was an American journalist and author from Texas who wrote about and championed racial equality.

Griffin was born in 1920 in Dallas, Texas, to John Walter Griffin and Lena May Young.

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 École de Médecine.

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.

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.

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.

At that point he began to develop as a photographer.

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.

During this year, Griffin married an island woman.

In 1946, he went slowly blind, the after effect of a severe concussion that he had received from a Japanese bomb.

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.

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.

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 would remain blind until inexplicably regaining his sight in 1957.

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 conducted a kind of social study in his 1959 project, resulting in his book Black Like Me (1961).

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.

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).

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.

The wide publicity about the book made Griffin a national celebrity for a time.

The book had several editions.

This was later adapted into a 1964 film of the same name.

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.

A 50th anniversary edition of the book was published in 2011 by Wings Press.