Racial Tensions In Black Like Me By John Howard Griffin

Insight of the Deep South in the Segregation Era Black Like Me is a book about the intense racial tensions in the profoundly segregated deep south of the United States written by John Howard Griffin. The book focuses on the life experience of a disguised white man as a Negro in the South during the 1950s. The story narrates the struggles that an African-American has to endure in order to survive the hostile world of the segregated South filled with racial tensions. The book describes in detail the life experience of John Howard Griffin as a “Negro” during his six-week journey through the segregated world of the South. As a whole, the book describe how the African-American people live in the South during the segregated era in the south. …show more content…
The story narrated in the book involves the first-hand experience on how black people lived during segregation by a man disguised as a black man in the South. Mr. Griffin wanted to know how the other race view the world in which white people is successful in every way. As a man that represented the white race in a journey through the South, he wanted to know, “Were we racists or were we not?”, which was the important thing to discover with his journey. As John Howard Griffin stated, “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” (165). For this reason, Mr. Griffin change his pigment by taking medicine and using ultraviolet light to darken his skin in order to look like a Negro. His sole purpose was to infiltrate into the African-American community in order to view their world across the color line. He wanted to learn the truth about how they feel towards society by experiencing the real discrimination that everyone received everyday at any place. As Mr. Griffin explored deeper into the segregated places of the South like Mansfield, TX, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia he confronted the harsh reality in which the segregated population was living in. He saw how people were living in extreme poverty in street alleys, and how they desperately were in order to survive one more day. For example, the people were in constant stress by working in anything they could find in order to feed their family. It was common to see mothers lived alone because their husbands could not take the pressure of being unable to sustain the family, so the mothers were willing to do everything in their power to sustain their children which included turning to prostitution in order to be able to feed the family. John Howard Griffin learn