John Howard Griffin: The Journalist Who Lived Life on Both Sides of the Colour Line
- Cassy Morgan
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
When John Howard Griffin set out in 1959 to temporarily live as a Black man in the segregated Deep South, he wasn’t simply undertaking an experiment in journalism—he was crossing a dangerous divide in American society. His book Black Like Me would shock the country, spark controversy, and ultimately cement his place in history as a bold voice for racial equality. Yet Griffin’s life story is much more complex than this single act of radical empathy. From his youth in Europe and service in World War II, to his years of blindness, his conversion to Catholicism, and his battles with the Ku Klux Klan, Griffin’s life was full of twists that seem almost fictional.
Let's have a look at his remarkable journey: from Dallas to France, from the Solomon Islands to Texas, from blindness to sight, and ultimately into the heart of the Civil Rights Movement.
Early Life and Education
John Howard Griffin was born on 16 June 1920 in Dallas, Texas, to John Walter Griffin and Lena May Young. His mother, a gifted classical pianist, nurtured in him a love of music that would shape much of his early life.
Gifted both intellectually and musically, Griffin won a scholarship that took him to France. He studied French language and literature at the University of Poitiers, and later medicine at the École de Médecine. By the age of 19, his life was already entwined with the turbulence of the Second World War. He joined the French Resistance as a medic in the Atlantic port town of Saint-Nazaire. There, he took part in daring missions to help smuggle Austrian Jews to safety in England, a formative experience that deepened his sense of justice and personal courage.
War Service and a Life Changed
After returning to the United States, Griffin enlisted in the Army Air Forces and served 39 months in the South Pacific. His wartime experiences left him with medals for bravery, but also lasting injuries. He spent 1943–44 as the only white American stationed on the island of Nuni in the Solomon Islands. There he was tasked with studying the local culture and spent time living closely with islanders, even marrying a local woman during his posting.
Tragedy soon struck. A Japanese bomb caused a concussion so severe that by 1946 Griffin began to lose his sight. By the time he returned home to Texas, he was blind. He would live without vision for more than a decade, teaching piano to make a living and writing about his experiences. In 1952, he published his first novel, The Devil Rides Outside, a story set in a French monastery.
Then, in 1957, the impossible happened. Without medical explanation, Griffin’s sight returned. “I had resigned myself to a life in darkness,” he later reflected, “and suddenly the world burst into colour again.” While some later studies questioned whether Griffin exaggerated or even feigned aspects of his blindness, what is clear is that his restored vision set him on the path that would make him famous.
The Writer and Ethnographer
Even before Black Like Me, Griffin was exploring the intersection of culture and identity. His semi-autobiographical novel Nuni (1956) was drawn from his time in the Solomon Islands and showed his growing interest in ethnography. He wasn’t just a novelist, however, he was a thinker interested in how culture shaped human lives.
The years of blindness had sharpened his other senses and forced him to pay attention to how people behaved. When his sight returned, Griffin turned increasingly to photography, combining words and images to record the world around him.
The Black Like Me Project
In 1959, with the Civil Rights Movement gaining momentum, Griffin decided to undertake a bold experiment. He wanted to understand what life was really like for African Americans in the segregated South. Instead of relying on second-hand accounts, he chose to experience it himself.
With the help of a New Orleans dermatologist, Griffin darkened his skin through a regimen of oral drugs, sunlamp treatments, and creams. He shaved his head to disguise his hair. What emerged was a man who, for six weeks, would pass as Black.
Griffin travelled through Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, mostly by bus and by hitchhiking. He quickly discovered the daily indignities and dangers faced by African Americans: the struggle to find toilets, restaurants, and accommodation; the suspicion of shop clerks and bus
drivers; the open hostility of strangers.
He also encountered unexpected curiosity. White men frequently asked him intrusive questions about his sex life, reflecting the toxic stereotypes that underpinned much of American racism. Yet Griffin also recorded kindness from both Black communities who welcomed him and a handful of white Southerners who treated him decently despite the colour of his skin.
The project was underwritten by Sepia magazine, which published his reports under the title Journey into Shame. In 1961, Griffin expanded these into a book: Black Like Me.
The Impact of Black Like Me
The book was an immediate sensation. It became a bestseller and was translated into multiple languages. For many white Americans, it was the first time they had confronted the realities of segregation from such a visceral, first-person perspective.
Yet the response was not universally positive. In Griffin’s hometown of Mansfield, Texas, he and his family were threatened. A life-sized effigy of Griffin was hanged. He recalled later:
“It was not the big cities that frightened me—it was the small towns where hatred was tightest wound.”
The hostility became so intense that Griffin moved his family to Mexico for nine months before cautiously returning to Texas.
In 1964, Black Like Me was adapted into a film starring James Whitmore, further cementing its influence. Decades later, the book would still resonate, with a 50th anniversary edition published in 2011.
Violence and Perseverance
Griffin’s commitment to racial justice made him a target for extremist groups. In 1964, he was severely beaten by members of the Ku Klux Klan, a brutal reminder of the risks faced by civil rights activists. He survived, but the attack left lasting effects on his health.
Despite this, he continued to lecture, write, and speak publicly about race relations. He received the Pacem in Terris Award in 1964, an honour given for contributions to peace and justice.
Friendship with Thomas Merton
In the later years of his life, Griffin grew close to Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk and influential spiritual writer. The two men corresponded and shared a deep interest in the intersection of spirituality and social justice. Griffin was eventually chosen by Merton’s estate to write his authorised biography. Ill-health prevented him from completing it, but his writings on Merton remain an important resource for scholars of the monk’s life.
Final Years and Death
By the 1970s, Griffin’s health was declining. He had developed type 2 diabetes, which limited his ability to work. On 9 September 1980, at the age of 60, John Howard Griffin died in Fort Worth, Texas, from complications of the disease.
Persistent rumours claimed he had died of skin cancer caused by the chemicals he had used during Black Like Me. In fact, Griffin never had skin cancer. The drugs he used did cause side effects, fatigue and nausea, but not the disease.
He was buried in Mansfield, Texas, alongside his wife Elizabeth after her death.
Legacy
John Howard Griffin’s life defied simple categorisation. He was a soldier, musician, novelist, ethnographer, activist, and Catholic convert. But above all, he was a man willing to risk his life to expose injustice.
His decision to “cross the colour line” in 1959 remains one of the most daring acts of participatory journalism ever undertaken. As civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. once remarked, works like Griffin’s forced white Americans to face “the brutality of segregation not in statistics, but in the story of one man’s body and soul.”
Today, Black Like Me is still studied in classrooms, both as literature and as a historical document of America on the brink of civil rights transformation. Griffin’s willingness to put himself in danger to tell the truth ensures his place in the long struggle for racial equality.
Sources
Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.
Washington Post archives on John Howard Griffin and Black Like Me.
“John Howard Griffin Papers,” Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas.
Wings Press, Black Like Me: 50th Anniversary Edition (2011).
Robert Bonazzi, Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me (1997).
