PITTSBURGH – This is, as we all know, the month in which we celebrate the very real achievements and struggles for freedom endured by Black Americans, the more than 40 million alive today and past generations who endured unspeakable horrors.
Many of us, especially students, will read the words of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and perhaps Malcolm X. There will be celebrations of President Obama and Vice-President Kamala Harris, and commemorations of people across the spectrum of American life, from Harriet Tubman to Jackie Robinson to Aretha Franklin.
But few, sadly, will know that this year is the 75th anniversary of a too-little known feat of journalism that exposed the horrors of racism and segregation long before most of America knew, or even wanted, to know how people were treated in the Deep South.
The hero of this story is a man named Ray Sprigle, the greatest reporter The Blade’s sister paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ever produced — and one of the greatest investigative reporters of his day.
Sprigle was not Black – except for 30 days of his long and tumultuous life, when he risked his safety, and likely his life, to live as a “Negro” (the polite word then) traveling in the spring of 1948 through the deepest and worst of the Jim Crow South.
“He was not a civil rights crusader or a soft-hearted liberal, but a reporter who believed in justice and thought this was an amazing story,” said Bill Steigerwald, another former Pittsburgh reporter who wrote a spellbinding book published in 2017, 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South.
For a month, Ray Sprigle lived as a Black man traveling in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, collecting information for the blockbuster, 21-part series he would write when he returned. What was especially remarkable was that he was a stocky, light-skinned man of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. In preparing to change his identity, he found a concoction that did darken his skin, but as he reported, also found that “a day or two later it will neatly remove the human hide;” in this case, a square foot of the skin on Sprigle’s chest.
Eventually, he hooked up with Walter White, a light-skinned African-American, then head of the NAACP, who explained that being a Negro in the Deep South was much more about how you behaved than how you looked. Sprigle did attempt to get a significant tan in Florida, but mainly dressed, looked and acted Black.
Throughout his career, Sprigle had been essentially fearless. He had gone down an unsafe coal mine masquerading as a strike-breaking miner, putting himself doubly at risk, and checked into a horrible, snake-pit style insane asylum. He’d stood calmly on London rooftops when Nazis were bombing Britain during the Blitz.
He knew, however, he might well have been in even more danger if he had been exposed as a white man masquerading as Black, or if he forgot himself and talked back to someone. “I might mention that I gave nobody a chance. I saw to it that I never got in the way of one of the master race. I almost wore out my cap, dragging it off my shaven (head) whenever I addressed a white man. I ‘sirred’ everybody. I took no chances,” he wrote.
That doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have been found out. Fortunately, he wasn’t, perhaps because Walter White arranged for one of the most important African-Americans in the nation, John Wesley Dobbs, to travel with and vouch for him. For a month, Sprigle saw things that would make a rock weep.
They included a grieving Black doctor who had built a magnificent tomb for the wife and baby he had lost when no white hospital would admit her when she needed a Caesarian section. He exposed the horror of segregated schools, wrote about a simple farm woman whose innocent husband had been beaten to death.
He told the story of a World War II hero, Macy Yost Snipes, who had been shot to death in Georgia merely for the sin of wanting to vote, and many more such heartbreaking stories.
When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published the series, it was a national sensation. Other northern papers published it – but no Southern ones would, and a powerful Southern editor prevented Sprigle from getting a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize. I’ve told his story more fully in my book. Reason vs. Racism, and Bill Steigerwald tells it superbly in his excellent biography.
Sprigle went on doing superb work into his seventies, dying in a freak accident in 1957 when he was in a taxi that was rammed by a reckless driver. This year, Bill Steigerwald tried to get the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh to put on a small photo exhibit to commemorate what Sprigle did three-quarters of a century ago.
“This should be a no-brainer. The Center has archived his papers, and it even has his famous pipe,” he told them.
They declined, however. “We actually work two or three years ahead in planning our exhibits, so unfortunately that’s not something we can easily do,” a director told him. He was a bit irked. “Sprigle deserves much more.” As he noted in his book, he “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.”
What Steigerwald has done is republish the series Sprigle wrote, together with an introduction and commentary, as a new book. Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow. Both his books, as well as mine are available on Amazon. Read this story, and you’ll never feel quite the same about race again.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
