30 Days a Black Man

The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South

Bill Steigerwald

• Publisher: Lyons Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781493026197
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Jim Crow, U.S.A.
• Chapter 2: Ray Sprigle, Star Reporter
• Chapter 3: Pittsburgh in White and Black
• Chapter 4: “Mr. NAACP”
• Chapter 5: Learning to Become a Negro
• Chapter 6: Teaming Up with Mr. Dobbs
• Chapter 7: The Poor, Poor South
• Chapter 8: Atlanta in Black and White
• Chapter 9: On the Road to Americus
• Chapter 10: An Oasis in the Desert of Injustice
• Chapter 11: Sneaking Through the Delta
• Chapter 12: America’s “Last Outpost of Feudalism”
• Chapter 13: The Long Reach of “White Malice”
• Chapter 14: Nominating “President Dewey”
• Chapter 15: Waking Up the White North
• Chapter 16: A Civil War over Civil Rights
• Chapter 17: Telling Sprigle’s Story to Black America
• Chapter 18: Sticking Up for Old Jim Crow
• Chapter 19: Truman’s November Surprise
• Chapter 20: The Great Radio Debate
• Chapter 21: A Mission Forgotten by History
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• About the Author