30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South

by Bill Steigerwald, Juan Williams political analyst and author of Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Y (Foreword by)

Overview

In 1948 most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South.

Escorted through the South’s parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers and doctors.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter’s series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s leading black paper. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at "the iniquitous Jim Crow system" shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America’s system of apartheid.

Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffin’s similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigle’s intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the South.

Author Bill Steigerwald elevates Sprigle’s groundbreaking exposé to its rightful place among the seminal events of the early Civil Rights movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781493026197
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	04/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Bill Steigerwald’s thirty-six-year career as a journalist included stints with the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. At the Trib he was an associate editor, feature writer, book page editor/writer, editorial writer, weekly op-ed columnist and weekly interviewer of important newsmakers. His work has appeared in dozens of major American papers and in magazines as disparate as Reason, Family Circle, Men’s Journal, and Penthouse. He lives just outside of Pittsburgh.

Table of Contents

Foreword Juan Williams ix

Chapter 1 Jim Crow, U.S.A 1

Chapter 2 Ray Sprigle, Star Reporter 15

Chapter 3 Pittsburgh in White and Black 33

Chapter 4 "Mr. NAACP" 53

Chapter 5 Learning to Become a Negro 64

Chapter 6 Teaming Up with Mr. Dobbs 75

Chapter 7 The Poor, Poor South 88

Chapter 8 Atlanta in Black and White 104

Chapter 9 On the Road to Americus 113

Chapter 10 An Oasis in the Desert of Injustice 129

Chapter 11 Sneaking Through the Delta 144

Chapter 12 America's "Last Outpost of Feudalism" 158

Chapter 13 The Long Reach of "White Malice" 169

Chapter 14 Nominating "President Dewey" 183

Chapter 15 Waking Up the White North 192

Chapter 16 A Civil War over Civil Rights 203

Chapter 17 Telling Sprigle's Story to Black America 215

Chapter 18 Sticking Up for Old Jim Crow 231

Chapter 19 Truman's November Surprise 247

Chapter 20 The Great Radio Debate 257

Chapter 21 A Mission Forgotten by History 271

Epilogue 284

Bibliography 298

Index 302

About the Author 316

Editorial Reviews

This is a vivid, well-researched account of a journalistic coup. White Ray Sprigle passing for black in the Jim Crow South—the danger, the narrow escapes, the abuses, the revelations. But it is also a set of portraits: of the brave black men who helped Sprigle fulfill his assignment; a portrait of the Deep South; and a portrait of the United States in the late 1940s.

Paul Theroux

The courage displayed by Ray Sprigle and John Wesley Dobbs on their journey into the Deep South is one of the major feats of investigative journalism during the pre-Civil Rights era. Bill Steigerwald’s book is an unflinching examination of race relations in this country’s recent past and the true impact that uncompromising journalism can have on our world.

Jesse Holland

As a story from the Jim Crow past, Bill Steigerwald’s recounting of Sprigle’s mission. .. reminds us of what an honest conversation about race can accomplish as we continue on the path toward a more equitable future.

Juan Williams

Bill Steigerwald is an author who always delights and informs, here recounting the frightening story of two courageous men, one black and the other a white Pittsburgh newspaper reporter posing as black, traveling through the Jim Crow South of 1948 to expose a vicious and brutal system of racial segregation.

David Cay Johnston

Steigerwald sees Sprigle as an unlikely hero who delivered harsh truths to an audience that. .. might never have seen those stories given the era’s segregated press… [I]t’s a story worth discussing today.

Smithsonian Magazine

A fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure…Sprigle's audacity was forgotten, but Steigerwald turns it into rollicking, haunting American history.

Kirks Reviews

Narrator Grover Gardner portrays Pittsburgh reporter Ray Sprigle, who, having darkened his skin by sunburn, became a black man to tour the South in 1948, showing his readers black lives under Jim Crow laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Sprigle isn't remembered today, but his writing helped start a national discussion on race that continues today. Bill Steigerwald adds background on the era and the discussion. Gardner's narration is clear and crisp, keeping the focus on Sprigle's experience. Visits with sharecroppers, reports on shootings by police and streetcar operators in Atlanta, and everyday indignities draw listeners into Sprigle's fascinating, horrifying journey. Listeners may well share his relief when he leaves Mississippi and when he finally crosses the "Smith & Wesson line" into Ohio. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2017 - AudioFile

2017-02-21
Fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure.Longtime journalist Steigerwald (Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about Travels with Charley, 2012, etc.) offers a valuable corrective in resurrecting Ray Sprigle (1886-1957), an old-school white Pittsburgh newspaperman who produced an exposé after traveling the South disguised as a black man. As Juan Williams notes in his foreword, "over thirty days, Sprigle learned of the daily humiliations experienced by blacks in the 1948 Deep South." Before he details Sprigle's tense journey, Steigerwald strongly depicts the pre-civil rights landscape, arguing that most white Americans could ignore blacks' plight, and some enforced the color line. He focuses on once-prominent figures, including the NAACP's driven head Walter Francis White (who actually appeared white), so-called "progressive segregationists" like journalist Hodding Carter, and determined middle-class blacks like John Wesley Dobbs, a Masonic Grand Master (and passionate Atlanta booster despite its segregation) recruited by White to guide Sprigle. He portrays Atlanta and Pittsburgh as cities in their primes, vastly different for black and white citizens, as was the country overall in 1948: "Civil rights and desegregation were in the headlines every day." Sprigle, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Ku Klux Klan associations of Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, was described by Time as "a hard-digging, hell-for-leather newsman." Passing as a black man with a deep suntan and workman's clothes, after learning that dyes would be toxic, Sprigle traveled through several states, from Atlanta to the Mississippi Delta, and avoided danger due to Dobbs' counsel: "to stay out of trouble and avoid harm you had to be vigilant as well as meek, lowly, and docile. His newspaper stories were carried nationwide and turned into a book, yet Steigerwald concludes, "by Christmas of 1948, the intense debate over the future of Jim Crow segregation had burned out in the national media." Sprigle's audacity was forgotten, but Steigerwald turns it into rollicking, haunting American history.

Kirkus Reviews