John Howard Griffin: The Journalist Who Lived Life on Both Sides of the Colour Line
- Aug 29, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
In 1959, John Howard Griffin darkened his skin, shaved his head, and spent six weeks travelling through the segregated Deep South as a Black man. The resulting book, Black Like Me, became one of the most read accounts of American racism ever published. It's also only one chapter in a life that included the French Resistance, a decade of blindness, a bout of malaria that left him temporarily paralysed, and a beating by the Ku Klux Klan.
Quick Answers
● Who was John Howard Griffin? A white American writer from Texas who, in 1959, medically darkened his skin to travel through the segregated South as a Black man, publishing the experience as Black Like Me (1961).
● Was John Howard Griffin really blind for years? Yes. He lost his sight gradually after a wartime head injury and was blind for roughly a decade before it returned, unexplained, in 1957. Some later researchers have questioned aspects of the story.
● Did the Ku Klux Klan attack Griffin? Yes. In 1964 he was severely beaten by Klan members, one of several violent responses to Black Like Me that also included an effigy of him being hanged in his hometown.
● What happened to Griffin after Black Like Me? He continued lecturing and writing on race relations, became a close friend of the monk Thomas Merton, and was chosen to write Merton's authorised biography before ill health stopped him. He died in 1980.
Early Life and the French Resistance
John Howard Griffin was born on 16 June 1920 in Dallas, Texas, to John Walter Griffin and Lena May Young. His mother, a classical pianist, gave him an early love of music. A scholarship took him to France, where he studied French language and literature at the University of Poitiers and later medicine at the École de Médecine. At 19, with war closing in around him, he joined the French Resistance as a medic in the Atlantic port town of Saint-Nazaire, helping smuggle Austrian Jewish refugees to safety in England.
War, Malaria and Blindness
Griffin returned to the United States and enlisted in the Army Air Forces, serving 39 months in the South Pacific and earning decorations for bravery. For roughly a year he was posted alone as the only European-American on a remote island in the Solomon chain, tasked with studying the local culture, and married an island woman during his time there, a marriage that effectively ended when he was reassigned and later returned home without her. In 1946, a concussion from a Japanese bomb began robbing him of his sight. Some years later, a bout of spinal malaria left him temporarily paraplegic as well as blind, a period he later credited with deepening a Catholic faith he'd formally adopted in 1952.
He remained blind for roughly a decade, teaching piano to make a living and writing about his experiences. Then, recovering from the malaria, he was walking in his yard one afternoon when he noticed a strange, swirling redness in his vision. Within months, for reasons doctors were never able to explain, his sight was fully restored. A later academic study revisiting Griffin's published and unpublished writing has questioned whether he exaggerated or partly performed aspects of his blindness, an argument that remains debated among scholars rather than settled.
The Writer and Ethnographer
Even before Black Like Me, Griffin was exploring questions of culture and identity. In 1952 he published his first novel, The Devil Rides Outside, set in a French monastery. His semi-autobiographical Nuni (1956) drew on his time in the Solomon Islands and showed a growing interest in ethnography, including a frank later acknowledgement that he'd gone into that posting assuming, in his own words, that his was a superior culture. When his sight returned, he turned increasingly to photography, combining images and text to document the world he could suddenly see again.
The Black Like Me Project
In 1959, with the Civil Rights Movement gathering pace, Griffin decided to find out directly what life was like for African Americans in the segregated South rather than relying on secondhand accounts. With a New Orleans dermatologist's help, he darkened his skin using oral medication and sunlamp treatments and shaved his head. For six weeks he passed as a Black man, travelling mostly by bus and hitchhiking through Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina.
He documented the daily indignities: the struggle to find a toilet, a restaurant, or a room for the night; the suspicion of shop clerks and bus drivers; open hostility from strangers, and, repeatedly, intrusive questions from white men about his sex life, reflecting the racist stereotypes underpinning much of the abuse. He also recorded kindness, from Black communities who took him in and a handful of white Southerners who treated him decently regardless. Sepia magazine, which had funded the project, published his reports as Journey Into Shame before Griffin expanded them into Black Like Me in 1961.
A Guide Named Sterling Williams
Griffin's transformation nearly fell apart before it began. On his first morning disguised, he headed to a French Quarter shoeshine stand run by Sterling Williams, a man he'd known casually as a white customer for months. Williams looked straight at him and showed no hint of recognition at all, not even from the shoes he'd shined for Griffin many times before. Shaken by how completely the disguise worked, Griffin later wrote that he felt “imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger.” He told Williams the truth, and Williams, rather than being angry at the deception, laughed and agreed to let him work the stand for a few days, becoming his guide into the city's Black community. It was Williams who first spoke to Griffin as one of “us” rather than an outsider, and it was at that shoeshine stand that Griffin got his first real lesson in how white customers behaved when they assumed no one was really watching: as Williams put it about the men who propositioned him for sex, “When they want to sin, they're very democratic.”
The Impact of Black Like Me
The book was an immediate sensation, becoming a bestseller and eventually selling in the millions worldwide. For many white readers, it was their first visceral, first-person account of segregation. The backlash in Griffin's hometown of Mansfield, Texas, was severe: he and his family were threatened, and an effigy of him was hanged in public. Griffin later joked bitterly in a 1964 interview that he'd probably made Mansfield the “effigy burning capital of the world.” The hostility pushed him to move his family to Mexico for nine months before cautiously returning to Texas. A film adaptation starring James Whitmore followed in 1964, and the book remains in print, including a 60th-anniversary edition with a new foreword by Bernardine Evaristo.
Violence and Perseverance
Griffin's activism made him a target. In 1964, he was severely beaten by members of the Ku Klux Klan, an attack that left lasting effects on his health. He continued lecturing and writing on race relations regardless, and worked alongside major figures of the movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., Dick Gregory, Saul Alinsky and NAACP director Roy Wilkins. In 1964 he received the Pacem in Terris Award for contributions to peace and justice.
Friendship with Thomas Merton
In his later years, Griffin grew close to Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and influential spiritual writer, and the two corresponded extensively on faith and social justice. After Merton's sudden death in 1968, Merton's estate chose Griffin to write his authorised biography, and Griffin reportedly spent time living in Merton's own monastic cell while researching it. Ill health ultimately prevented him from finishing the book, but his writings on Merton remain a resource for scholars of the monk's life.
Final Years and Death
By the 1970s, Griffin's health was declining with type 2 diabetes. He died on 9 September 1980 in Fort Worth, Texas, aged 60, from complications of the disease. Persistent rumours claimed he'd died of skin cancer caused by the chemicals used during Black Like Me; in fact, he never had skin cancer, though the drugs did cause side effects including fatigue and nausea. He was buried in Mansfield, Texas, beside his wife Elizabeth.
Legacy
Griffin defied easy categorisation: soldier, musician, novelist, ethnographer, activist, Catholic convert. Studs Terkel, who wrote the foreword to later editions of Black Like Me, called him “one of the most remarkable people I have ever encountered.” Black Like Me is still taught in classrooms today, both as literature and as a historical document of a country on the brink of civil rights transformation, and Griffin's willingness to risk his own safety to tell that story secures his place in that history
Frequently Asked Questions
Did John Howard Griffin die of skin cancer?
No. This is a persistent rumour. He died in 1980 from complications of type 2 diabetes. The medication he used to darken his skin in 1959 caused temporary side effects but not cancer.
How long did John Howard Griffin live as a Black man?
Around six weeks in 1959, travelling through Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina.
Was Black Like Me controversial?
Very. Griffin and his family received death threats and were driven temporarily out of the country, and he was later beaten by the Ku Klux Klan. The book has also drawn academic debate over the ethics and limits of a white writer temporarily passing as Black.
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