Editor’s Note: Many Americans know the book Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin’s 1960 account of briefly posing as a Negro in the segregated South. But more than a decade before, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Ray Sprigle lived as a black man for a month in the Deep South, risking his life to expose racism of a kind that is almost unimaginable today.
Nobody had ever attempted anything like that before – yet an outraged Southern editor worked to deny him a Pulitzer Prize. The following is excerpted from Reason vs. Racism, a new book on newspapers and race by Jack Lessenberry.
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By Jack Lessenberry
When it came to undercover reporting, Ray Sprigle was the best in the business.
During the last months of World War II, he had posed as a black market butcher to expose how easy it was to thwart rationing rules. He had also worked as a coal miner during a bitter miners’ strike, and booked himself into a truly snake-pit style mental hospital to reveal the corruption and atrocities there.
He truly had nerves of steel, and would need them in the Deep South. No white journalist had ever tried to live as a Negro — the polite term then in use – in Jim Crow America. The idea was entirely Sprigle’s. “I put the suggestion before William Block and Andrew Bernhard, the publisher and editor of our Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,” he later wrote. “I didn’t have to do too much of a job of selling, and they finally gave me the word to go.” If Bill Block had any reservations, they probably had to do with the fear that Sprigle might get himself killed, which easily could have happened had Southern whites figured out who he was and what he was trying to do.
But not only did Ray Sprigle, a light-skinned white man manage to pass, he got blacks from all walks of life to trust him when the easily could have gotten them, as well as him, lynched.
For a month, he moved among black people as one of them. He found and later reported the harrowing story of Dr. P.W. Hill, a middle-class black dentist from Clarksdale, Mississippi, whose wife went into labor and died along with their newborn baby because no good hospital in the area would admit a black person.
He told painful stories of separate and unequal schools, of sharecroppers systematically cheated by landowners, and of black war heroes who were cruelly murdered when they had the audacity to try and exercise their basic right to vote.
Knowing that some critics would complain that he was only writing about bad things, Sprigle wrote, “This is no complete and impartial survey of the race problem in the South. I deliberately sought out the worst the South could show me in the way of discrimination and oppression … I deliberately sought the evil and the barbarous aspects of the white South’s treatment of the Negro.”
“How can you correct evil until you find it?”
But how did he get the stories he did?
The truth only came out decades later. He confided in Walter White, the head of the NAACP, who enthusiastically supported the project. He arranged for Sprigle to travel with the best companion and guide imaginable: John Wesley Dobbs of Atlanta, “a bigger than life” figure who was a major power in Atlanta’s black community, and in black Masonic circles throughout the country.
Dobbs was a man who could go anywhere in African-American society and who would be trusted, as would anyone he traveled with.
Sprigle tried various methods of dying his skin, but said “in more than six months of searching I couldn’t find any lotion or liquid that would turn a white hide brown,” without killing him.
Finally, he came to realize that passing as black in the segregated Deep South in 1948 had very little to do with how you looked and everything to do with how you acted.
“Black” people came in all shades and colors, and Sprigle got a quick crash course in living like a black man in the South.
“I almost wore out by cap, dragging it off my shaven (head) whenever I addressed a white man. I ‘sirred’ everybody. I took no chances,” he wrote later.
He did go to Florida to get the deepest tan he could, then shaved his head and put on old clothes of the sort a Negro laborer might wear, and then plunged into Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
The name Ray Sprigle was reasonably well known; he had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for exposing U.S. Supreme Court justice Hugo Black as a life member of the Ku Klux Klan. So Sprigle assumed the name James Rayel Crawford during the month he spent as black.
This was before the Civil Rights Movement had really begun. Martin Luther King, Jr., was an unknown teenager. Emmett Till was seven years old. The armed forces were rigidly segregated.
Interestingly, Sprigle did not have a political or social agenda. He was, in fact, “a staunch conservative Republican who hated FDR and the New Deal,” as former Post-Gazette reporter Bill Steigerwald wrote in his excellent 2017 biography of Ray Sprigle, 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South.
Later, Sprigle himself would write that while he ended up being deeply affected by the horrors he had found, “I might as well be honest … I wasn’t bent on any crusade. All I saw at first was the possibility of a darned good newspaper story.”
The story he found was, indeed, one that was fascinating, but also one of monstrous evil. Many of the stories he found are still deeply moving, such as that if Henry Gilbert, a hardworking black farmer who was “murdered by the white folks in Georgia, May 29, 1947” even though he had done nothing wrong. “When a Negro kills a white man and escapes, another Negro – any Negro — has to pay.
“Henry Gilbert just happened to be the Negro picked for slaughter.” When Gilbert’s wife asked “James Crawford” to pray for her, Sprigle was overcome with emotion. “Me, a white man, even though she thinks I am black? Who would listen?” he asked readers.
His reporting was a national sensation. When he returned from his undercover assignment, Sprigle wrote a searing, 21-part series, “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days.” Sales of the paper soared.
In addition to the Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade, Sprigle’s series ran in 13 major newspapers across the nation, and was praised by Time, Newsweek, and national icon Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote a fan letter to the Post-Gazette.
Publishers clamored for Sprigle to turn his series into a book, which he did with Simon & Schuster: In the Land of Jim Crow.
To many, a second Pulitzer Prize must have been a foregone conclusion given what he had accomplished.
Exposing that Hugo Black was a Klansman was certainly a journalistic coup. (Sprigle, a fascinating and eccentric character, was also a chicken farmer who got secrets out of a Klan leader by giving him advice on Leghorns and Wyandottes.)
But that story was not one that seriously risked Sprigle’s life, or required him to successfully convince an entire region that he was black. What he had uncovered in the Deep South was huge – and seemed irrefutable. He had begun his series by asking that nobody use the fact that there was still discrimination in the North as “a defense against the savage oppression and brutal intolerance the black man encounters in the South.”
But someone did.
Slyly, skillfully and persuasively. Not a cigar-chomping bigot, but the most prominent and most respected white “moderate” in the South, Hodding Carter II, the editor and publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Mississippi.
While he had courageously denounced economic and social injustice in the South, he had never questioned segregation. He was also very provincial when it came to his region. Carter felt it was all right for him to criticize it, but not for outsiders.
So Hodding Carter set out to discredit Sprigle’s work. And when it came to fairness, Sprigle never had a chance.
Hodding Carter struck back by first writing a six-part rebuttal, “The Other Side of Jim Crow.” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in the interest of fairness, printed Carter’s rebuttal.
Many Southern papers printed it as well. But every one of them — including Carter’s own Delta Democrat-Times — refused to print a single word of the series that Ray Sprigle had written.
This was long before the internet, and there was almost no television. All Southern readers knew was what Hodding Carter told them, and he told them “Sprigle’s picture is one-sided and distorted.”
Today, we know that conditions in the Deep South then were every bit as bad as Sprigle said. We know too that Carter’s claim that things were getting better and that northern criticism would only slow progress down was thoroughly contemptible.
Seven years later, Emmett Till, barely a teenager, would be brutally tortured and murdered in Hodding Carter’s state.
However, not only did Hodding Carter unfairly attack Ray Sprigle’s series, he did worse. He made sure he didn’t get the Pulitzer Prize he deserved. Carter was on the Pulitzer Prize jury that year.
Hodding Carter, a past Pulitzer winner himself, was a skilled, graceful and genteel writer. He was well connected, who had gone to school not in the south, but in Maine, where he spent summers.
One of his best friends, Rhode Island publisher Sevellon Brown, the man who suggested he write the rebuttal attacking Sprigle, was also on that jury. You might think Hodding Carter would have voluntarily recused himself from considering Sprigle’s entry.
After all, he had a clear conflict of interest. Carter had loudly attacked “30 days in the Land of Jim Crow” and attempted to suppress it – with great success in many states.
Nevertheless, Hodding Carter II remained on the jury, and — no surprise — Sprigle was denied the Pulitzer Prize. Sadly, the work he did was soon forgotten.
“There’s no evidence Sprigle’s series dramatically changed history,” Bill Steigerwald, Sprigle’s biographer, wrote.
“But by exposing the cold heart and soul of Jim Crow to the entire country, Sprigle provided a priceless contribution to the embryonic civil rights movement. He’ll go down in history as the first journalist — white or black –to strike a serious blow against segregation in the mainstream media.”
You have to wonder, though, if a little more attention might have been paid to the evils of racism if Ray Sprigle’s pioneering series had gotten the Pulitzer Prize it deserved.
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Note: Ray Sprigle continued to be a force in journalism well into his seventies, touring camps in Europe that held displaced victims of Nazi Germany; and exposing racketeering and police corruption and slumlords in Pittsburgh.
He kept at it until one Saturday night in December, 1957, when he worked late, as usual, took a cab home from the office, and was killed when a speeding car ran a red light and crashed into his cab.
Edited to add: To mark the 50th anniversary of Sprigle’s work, which was first published in the Post-Gazette beginning Aug. 9, 1948, the Post-Gazette republished selected chapters from his accounts. View here.
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