Thanks again to The Pittsburgh Courier

The once mighty black newspaper treated me and my history book '30 Days a Black Man' with respect when it came out in 2017. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette -- where I once worked -- did not.

In honor of the extended end of Black History Month, and in a shameless attempt to sell a copy or two of my black (and white) history book, '30 Days a Black Man,' here's me on the cover of The Pittsburgh Courier in July of 2017.

Writer/reporter Christian Morrow just whipped out his smartphone and took my photo, showed it to me for an OK and it ended up on Page 1 with his story about me and my book. It showed how much easier it was in 2017 than in the 1990s to shoot and process photos for a newspaper.

By the way, Pittsburgh's historic and once mighty black newspaper treated me and my book about Pittsburgh's greatest journalist, Ray Sprigle, with far more respect and attention than did my own former paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (where Sprigle starred in the 1930s-1950s).

For the record, as we liked to say, I personally handed my old friend and former Post-Gazette colleague Tony Norman a review copy of '30 Days' more than a month before its April 1, 2017 publication.

The PG didn't run the review in its Sunday book section until July 2. (Ordinarily, in the rules-bound world of newspapers, book reviews were timed to come out before or very close to the publication date.)

Also, in a city filled with great ex-journalists and black history experts at universities and the Senator John Heinz History Center, the review of '30 Days' -- a real book with a real publisher that was written about the PG's greatest reporter by an ex-PG staffer -- was assigned by book-editor Tony to a young, up-and-coming freelancer and future pro wrestling commentator who at that time ran a Pittsburgh sports blog.

Dominic DeAngelo did a perfectly good and fair job on the review, but I’ll never forgive the PG for its institutional disrespect and editorial incompetence.

I will always appreciate the way the Courier, Morrow and editor Rod Doss treated me. It was a honor to be on the Courier's front page -- the same place Sprigle's mug shot and historic, country-shocking 21-part series appeared for seven straight weeks in the fall of 1948.

*****

“30 Days a Black Man” covers Ray Sprigle’s trip to the South and the impact his 1948 undercover mission had on the country. Sprigle’s entire 21-part series — which ran in about 15 white papers and exclusively in the Pittsburgh Courier — is reprinted in “Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow.”