Exposing Old Jim Crow, 1948
Pittsburgh's greatest journalist Ray Sprigle spent a month posing as a black man in the segregated South. Then he shocked the whole country.
'I quit being white, and free, and an American citizen when I climbed aboard that Jim Crow coach. . . . From then on, until I came up out of the South four weeks later, I was black, and in bondage — not quite slavery but not quite freedom, either.'
-- Ray Sprigle
In May of 1948 star newspaperman Ray Sprigle of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette posed as a black man and traveled through the Deep South for a month.
Sprigle, heavily tanned, wanted to see for himself what life was like for the 10 million blacks living under the oppressive and humiliating system of legal segregation known as Jim Crow.
Based in Atlanta at the home of his guide John Wesley Dobbs, a prominent black political leader, Sprigle, 61, passed himself off as a light-skinned NAACP field investigator from Pittsburgh.
Dobbs, 66, drove the unlikely duo of accomplished old Republicans from Savannah to the dangerous and feudal Mississippi Delta in his hulking ‘47 Mercury Eight.
The separate and unequal social, political and economic conditions Sprigle saw made him ashamed to be an American.
What he wrote in his syndicated 21-part newspaper series shocked the white North, pissed off the white South, pleased millions of blacks and started the first debate in the national media about the future of legal segregation.
Sprigle's series was called I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days in both the Post-Gazette and in the only black paper that carried it, the Pittsburgh Courier, then the country's largest black weekly. Other major papers like the New York Herald-Tribune and the Seattle Times carried 12 parts of the series and titled it In the Land of Crow.
Sprigle’s series
Sprigle’s original 21-part series detailing how awful life for blacks was under the ‘Old Jim Crow,’ still shocking after seven decades, is collected in my Kindle ebook, Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow, available on Amazon.
My 2017 history book, 30 Days a Black Man, tells the whole story behind Sprigle's newspaper series, how it was blessed by the NAACP’s Walter White and the huge impact it had on a country that was strictly segregated in the South by law and in the North by fact. This interview with prolific and smart podcaster Andrew Keen provides a good look at what ‘30 Days’ is about.
Other items about ‘30 Days’ are here.
As someone who has himself written a book on this topic, I say there is none better than Steigerwald's book on Sprigle; I literally had a hard time putting it down.