Denzel still hasn't discovered '30 Days a Black Man'
Someone with money and brains needs to turn my timely tale of Ray Sprigle's undercover mission into the 1948 Jim Crow South into a limited series for Netflix.
June 12
It’s been five years since my ‘rollicking’ history book ‘30 Days a Black Man’ appeared on the shelves of America’s finest bookstores and the racks of our biggest airports.
Though its story about a daring journalism mission into the 1948 Jim Crow South gets timelier every day, print and ebook sales have been under 5,000 copies, thanks largely to it being tragically ignored by the major East Coast book review sites — the NY Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.
My big hope is that the book will be turned into a limited series for Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO…
I don’t care as long as it’s a quality production that sticks to the truth and informs viewers about a historic but forgotten collaboration between a star white newspaperman from Pittsburgh, Ray Sprigle, and the NAACP’s John Wesley Dobbs that shocked the entire country.
As Juan Williams, Paul Theroux and others attest below, ‘30 Days’ is a readable history book that will shock most people today who have no clue how oppressive, unequal and humiliating the real Jim Crow was like for 10 million blacks living in the South in 1948.
My new ebook Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow includes Sprigle’s original 21-part series, which remains shocking today.
Anyone with $20 or $30 million and Denzel Washington’s phone number who wants to win an Oscar or two is encouraged to send me an email.
Reviews
Kirkus Review --
Fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure.
Longtime journalist Steigerwald (Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about Travels with Charley, 2012, etc.) offers a valuable corrective in resurrecting Ray Sprigle (1886-1957), an old-school white Pittsburgh newspaperman who produced an exposé after traveling the South disguised as a black man.
As Juan Williams notes in his foreword, "over thirty days, Sprigle learned of the daily humiliations experienced by blacks in the 1948 Deep South."
Before he details Sprigle's tense journey, Steigerwald strongly depicts the pre-civil rights landscape, arguing that most white Americans could ignore blacks' plight, and some enforced the color line.
He focuses on once-prominent figures, including the NAACP's driven head Walter Francis White (who actually appeared white), so-called "progressive segregationists" like journalist Hodding Carter, and determined middle-class blacks like John Wesley Dobbs, a Masonic Grand Master (and passionate Atlanta booster despite its segregation) recruited by White to guide Sprigle.
He portrays Atlanta and Pittsburgh as cities in their primes, vastly different for black and white citizens, as was the country overall in 1948: "Civil rights and desegregation were in the headlines every day."
Sprigle, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Ku Klux Klan associations of Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, was described by Time as "a hard-digging, hell-for-leather newsman."
Passing as a black man with a deep suntan and workman's clothes, after learning that dyes would be toxic, Sprigle traveled through several states, from Atlanta to the Mississippi Delta, and avoided danger due to Dobbs' counsel: "to stay out of trouble and avoid harm you had to be vigilant as well as meek, lowly, and docile.
His newspaper stories were carried nationwide and turned into a book, yet Steigerwald concludes, "by Christmas of 1948, the intense debate over the future of Jim Crow segregation had burned out in the national media."
Sprigle's audacity was forgotten, but Steigerwald turns it into rollicking, haunting American history.
Blurbs
Juan Williams at FOX News ---
As a story from the Jim Crow past, Bill Steigerwald’s recounting of Sprigle’s mission . . . reminds us of what an honest conversation about race can accomplish as we continue on the path toward a more equitable future.
Paul Theroux, travel guru --
This is a vivid, well-researched account of a journalistic coup. White Ray Sprigle passing for black in the Jim Crow South—the danger, the narrow escapes, the abuses, the revelations. But it is also a set of portraits: of the brave black men who helped Sprigle fulfill his assignment; a portrait of the Deep South; and a portrait of the United States in the late 1940s.
David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter --
Bill Steigerwald is an author who always delights and informs, here recounting the frightening story of two courageous men, one black and the other a white Pittsburgh newspaper reporter posing as black, traveling through the Jim Crow South of 1948 to expose a vicious and brutal system of racial segregation.
Jesse Holland, author and AP bureau guy in DC --
The courage displayed by Ray Sprigle and John Wesley Dobbs on their journey into the Deep South is one of the major feats of investigative journalism during the pre-Civil Rights era. Bill Steigerwald’s book is an unflinching examination of race relations in this country’s recent past and the true impact that uncompromising journalism can have on our world.
Smithsonian magazine --
Steigerwald sees Sprigle as an unlikely hero who delivered harsh truths to an audience that . . . might never have seen those stories given the era’s segregated press… [I]t’s a story worth discussing today.
The Weekly Standard’s Review
Separate & Unequal
By James Hill
June 02, 2017
Ray Sprigle probably had no idea when he set out for the assignment of a lifetime that his journalism would become, to quote the overused cliché, "the first rough draft of history."
His 1948 series in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days"—shocked readers in western Pennsylvania.
Through syndication in 14 other newspaper markets around the nation it sparked a lively debate, especially among some Southern editors who were appalled that a Yankee reporter, disguising himself as a black man, could tell them what was obviously wrong (everything) with separate-but-equal segregation. And it drew praise from liberals such as former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Still, by the time the civil rights movement was in full bloom in the 1960s, Sprigle's groundbreaking journalism was largely forgotten, perhaps the ultimate victim of that other journalistic from the print era: Yesterday's news is tomorrow's fish wrap.
Whatever.
Bill Steigerwald brings the story back to life with the highly readable and impressively researched 30 Days a Black Man. It is as if he had found the missing link to one of the greatest exercises of nonviolence in human history, and he makes us all vividly aware of Sprigle's contribution to the eventual triumph of right over wrong.
Not that Sprigle was setting out to be a civil rights icon. As Steigerwald notes, the Post-Gazette's star reporter was just looking for a good story when he came up with the idea to go undercover and investigate conditions in Dixie that everyone seemingly knew existed but few wanted to do anything about.
"For an old newsman with muckraking in his heart, the Jim Crow idea was a no-brainer," Steigerwald writes.
The times were changing as well.
World War II had exposed the inequity of African-American soldiers being forced to follow the rules of both de facto and de jure segregation in the armed forces, and when they returned home.
The Swedish journalist Gunnar Myrdal had published his study of American race relations in 1944. John Gunther's Inside USA had highlighted Southern poverty in 1947. Harry Truman had already formed a President's Committee on Civil Rights and, in 1947, became the first chief executive to address the NAACP national convention.
"The routine legal, social, and economic abuse of millions of citizens in the South by their own governments was not news, sadly," Steigerwald writes, "but it was an ongoing American travesty. It had been crying out for an in-depth, first-person expose by a skilled writer and reporter, yet no major Northern newspaper or magazine had ever done so."
Enter Ray Sprigle.
His status in the Post-Gazette newsroom allowed him to mix both fact and opinion in his articles. Going undercover to get a story was one of his trademarks; he had also impersonated a coal miner working as a "scab" during a strike, and checked himself in as a patient to detail the conditions of Pennsylvania's state mental hospitals. He also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for reporting that the Supreme Court justice Hugo Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Yet nothing he had done would prove as challenging as his foray into the Deep South. For one thing, he was white. (To pass as black, he sunburned himself.)
For another, he would need a guide to help him navigate the treacherous journey. This came in the form of John Wesley Dobbs, a Masonic leader in Atlanta recruited by Walter White, the NAACP president, to show Sprigle the parts of the South that weren't whistling "Dixie."
His series, Steigerwald reports, "hit the front page of the Post-Gazette like an atomic bomb." More fallout ensued: Southerners reacted angrily, with newspaper editors, like the dilettantish Hodding Carter Jr. of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, taking particular umbrage. (Carter would appear with Sprigle on a nationwide radio broadcast, and later in a follow-up debate, and never missed a chance to discredit him in print.)
No Southern editor would carry his series when it was offered through syndication, but plenty saw it as an example of Northern hostility, a publicity ploy, and affront to their way of life.
In truth, they had one thing right: Sprigle had no use for white supremacy. His days as a black man taught him that the Jim Crow system could not last, and was collapsing under its self-imposed weight.
"By going undercover and passing as a black man," Steigerwald writes, "Sprigle was seeing, hearing, and feeling things that gave his first-person journalism the depth and credibility it needed to rise beyond a stunt."
And, as the author makes clear, it was something we should never forget.
James Hill is a retired journalist now living in Arizona.
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