The White Journalist Who Turned His Skin Black to Expose the Jim Crow South
As the Supreme Court and the White House push a "colorblind" America that treats acknowledging race as the problem, let's revisit John Howard Griffin, who darkened his skin in 1959 to expose Jim Crow.
In January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” stripping affirmative action requirements from federal contractors. It built on the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision gutting affirmative action in college admissions, where Chief Justice Roberts leaned hard on the idea of a colorblind Constitution. By January 2026, the attorneys general of Florida and Texas had declared most DEI programs flatly unconstitutional, and companies from Target to Meta and Google were quietly dismantling the diversity work they had announced with so much fanfare a few years ago.
The logic behind all of it is seductive and convenient. The fair, enlightened, modern thing to do is to stop seeing race at all, treat everyone the same, and watch as the problem dissolves.
More than sixty years ago, a white man from Texas set out to test that idea. He decided the only way to understand American racism was to see it from the inside, and his experiment and its reception among white America shows whose stories this country chooses to believe.
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Griffin Darkens His Skin to Live as a Black Man
John Howard Griffin was born in Dallas in 1920 and raised in Fort Worth, where he absorbed the casual segregation of his community. At fifteen, he won a place at a French boarding school and was startled to find Black students eating in the same cafés as everyone else. When World War II came, he joined the French Resistance and helped smuggle Jewish children to safety, which landed his name on a Nazi death list. After being hit by shrapnel from an air raid, Griffin was blinded, and he lived without sight for more than a decade. He later wrote that the blind “can only see the heart and intelligence of a man,” and that neither of those things reveals whether a man is white or Black. His sight returned, with no clear medical explanation, in 1957.
By 1959, Griffin was a devout Catholic who had come to see racism as a human problem. He had spent a lot of time thinking about a question that he later p=ut on the first page of his most famous book: If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South, what adjustments would he have to make? He was convinced that white and Black Southerners had simply stopped telling each other the truth, because a Black man who spoke honestly to a white man risked his livelihood or his life. The only way to learn what was really happening, Griffin concluded, was to become a Black man himself.
With funding from Sepia, a Black-themed magazine, he visited a New Orleans dermatologist, took a drug used to treat vitiligo, spent hours under sun lamps, darkened his skin with stain, and shaved his head. On November 1, 1959, he looked in a mirror and saw a stranger he did not recognize and, by his own admission, did not much like. Then he walked out the door.
Griffin Endures Six Weeks on the Other Side of the Color Line
In New Orleans, Griffin befriended a shoe-shine man named Sterling Williams, who let him work at his stand and became his first real guide to living as a Black man. While working, White customers only acknowledged Griffin to ask whether he could help them find Black girls for sex. He could rarely find a restroom he was allowed to use or a restaurant that would serve him. No other employer would hire him, and most clerks refused to cash his checks. He got used to what he came to call the “hate stare,” a look of pure contempt that he said left him sick at heart, not because it threatened him but because of what it revealed about the people giving it.
He rode Greyhound buses through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, sometimes hitchhiking, and watched how the color of his skin completely changed the way people treated him. In Hattiesburg, still tense from a recent lynching, he wrote that hell could be no lonelier. White men who offered him rides often wanted nothing more than to interrogate him about his sex life or boast about their own fantasies. After only a few weeks he had sunk into a deep depression he could barely manage, even though he knew he could end the experiment whenever he wanted by stopping the treatments and returning to life as a white man. The Black people he had been living with had no such option.
Griffin Becomes a Celebrity and a Target
Griffin turned his notes into a series for Sepia called “Journey into Shame,” then into “Black Like Me,” published in October 1961. The book sold ten million copies, was translated into fourteen languages, became a film, and was assigned in high schools across the country, making Griffin one of the most recognized voices on Southern racism in America.
That fame made him a target among white Southerners who saw him as a race traitor. In his hometown of Mansfield, Texas, they hanged him in effigy and burned a likeness of him, painted half black and half white, on Main Street. After someone threatened to castrate him, he moved his family to Mexico for their safety. A group of Klansmen dragged him from his car on a Mississippi roadside in 1964 and beat him with chains, leaving him for dead. It took him five months to recover.
The millions of white readers across the country reacted very differently from his Mansfield neighbors. They believed Griffin’s account of Jim Crow even though they had spent decades dismissing Black Americans who described the same conditions, and the color of his skin was what made the difference. The scholar Gerald Early has credited Griffin’s book with finally convincing white America that Black people describing racism were not exaggerating. Historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote that the people in power could not hear these claims when they were coming from Black people, and that it took an outsider to make the point land. Stokely Carmichael called it an “excellent book” for white people.
Griffin agreed. He eventually stopped lecturing on the book, saying it was absurd for a white man to speak for Black people when they had powerful voices of their own. He knew Black writers and activists had been describing their Jim Crow experiences for years, but many white Americans only began paying attention when a white man repeated it.
The book stayed in the culture long after Griffin died. In a 1984 Saturday Night Live sketch called “White Like Me,” Eddie Murphy parodied Griffin’s book, using makeup to disguise himself as a white man and go undercover in white America after noting that people talk about two Americas, one Black and one white. In the sketch, Eddie’s new appearance made others treat him better, including a scene where a city bus got rid of its last Black passenger and instantly turned into a cocktail party for the white riders.
Written by Andy Breckman, the sketch aired ten days after Beverly Hills Cop opened, at the height of Murphy’s fame, and reached a far larger audience than the book ever had. Though it was played for laughs, it rested on the same idea that white and Black Americans moved through the same country under entirely different realities.
Colorblindness and the Comfort of Not Looking
The “colorblind” argument holds that the path to fairness is to stop seeing race entirely, treating any attention to it as the problem. Griffin’s experiment cuts directly against that idea, because he bridged the gap between Black and white America by forcing himself to see what race actually meant in the lives of the people living under it.
Griffin also came incredibly close to actual colorblindness. For more than a decade he lived without sight, with no way to know the race of anyone he spoke to. And yet, this experience taught him the opposite lesson that “colorblind” advocates spread. When his sight returned and he darkened his skin, he understood that the way the world treated Black people had never once depended on whether he, personally, could perceive their color. The harm lived in how society saw them, and he couldn’t change that by deciding not to notice.
When people refuse to see race, they also lose the ability to see racism. The modern insistence that “I don’t see color” is an enlightened position is just a more refined version of the refusal that made Black accounts of racism difficult to hear in 1959.
It took Griffin six weeks and a chemically altered body to understand what Black Americans had been telling him all along. The advocates of colorblindness today are asking the country to do the reverse and un-see what is in front of it, and the cost of that refusal falls hardest on the people they have chosen to stop seeing.
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References
Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. New York: New American Library, 1961.
Watson, Bruce. “Black Like Me, 50 Years Later.” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2011.
Manzoor, Sarfraz. “Rereading: Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin.” The Guardian, October 27, 2011.
Pilgrim, David. “John Howard Griffin’s ‘Black Like Me.’” Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, May 2011.
“John Howard Griffin: An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Center.” Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Vincenty, Samantha. “Eddie Murphy’s ‘White Like Me’ SNL Sketch Parodies a Real Book.” NBC Insider, February 7, 2025.
It’s telling that white people would only believe a white person who temporarily suffered the indignities that Black people have always had to endure. And while I admire this man’s willingness to experience it for himself and try to make others understand, I’m ashamed that we still haven’t done the necessary work to diminish the ongoing racism in this country that undermines every other advancement. Thank you for this excellent article.
We read "Black Like Me" in my sophomore English/Social Studies class (that one was American Studies), and while we discussed his experiences and how it impacted white Americans, I wish we covered how he was followed by this and targeted by the KKK afterwards. I truly only learned much more recently that white allies were also targeted by the KKK and other hate groups for ages, and that there had been plenty of solidarity movements throughout our country's history. I would've preferred to learn about that than the barebones Revolution for the 4th time. (Learned much more about that from my ex-girlfriend/beloved friend, who works giving tours with the Boston History Company, who I saw you collaborated with recently!)