Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow
75 years ago Pittsburgh's star reporter Ray Sprigle, disguised as a black man, went to the South to see for himself the horrors of American apartheid. What he wrote in August of 1948 shocked the USA.
May 7, 1948
Washington DC., Union Station
How the two old troublemakers greeted each other for the first time will never be known.
But on Friday, May 7, 1948 Ray Sprigle of Pittsburgh and John Wesley Dobbs of Atlanta met somewhere inside the crowded granite caverns of Union Station.
Sprigle, 61, was a veteran reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who had won a Pulitzer in 1938 for exposing Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black as a past member of the KKK. Wearing a cheap floppy cap and unpolished workingman’s shoes, heavily tanned and slightly overweight, he was German-American white – but pretending to be black.
Dobbs, 66, was a prominent political and social leader and early civil rights activist known across the South. Dressed in an expensive suit and surrounded by fine luggage, tall and dignified, he was black.
Thirteen years before John Howard Griffin's acclaimed best-seller "Black Like Me" shook up the country and sold 10 million copies, Sprigle was passing himself off as a black man for a month for one simple reason. It was the only way he could see for himself what life was like for 10 million black Americans living under Jim Crow, the South’s oppressive, humiliating and feudal system of legal race segregation.
Soon after they met Sprigle and Dobbs boarded a sleek Jim Crow passenger train and traveled overnight to Atlanta in a segregated coach. It was then, Sprigle wrote, that “I quit being white, and free, and an American citizen. . . .
“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. My rights of citizenship ran only as far as the nearest white man said they did.”
Sprigle and Dobbs spent the next month living and traveling together in the Deep South.
With Dobbs serving as his host, guide, protector and driver, Sprigle posed as a light-skinned NAACP field investigator. Based in Atlanta, they drove 3,000 miles through the South’s parallel black society in Dobbs’ 1947 Mercury from Savannah to the Delta.
Because Dobbs was the longtime head of the Prince Hall Masons fraternal organization in Georgia, he was well known and respected by middle-class blacks across the South.
He introduced Sprigle to dirt-poor sharecroppers, rich farmers, dentists, school principals and politicians. He also took him to separate but obviously unequal black schools in rural Georgia and arranged an interview with the widow of an elderly man who’d recently been beaten to death in police custody.
When Sprigle returned to Pittsburgh he wrote a scathing, first-person series detailing his experiences in the Jim Crow South that ran during August in 15 northern newspapers from New York City to Seattle.
Clunkily titled “I was a Negro in the South for 30 Days” in some papers and “In the Land of Jim Crow” in others, the series was essentially a one-sided, 21-part op-ed piece. It easily shocked white readers in the North whose hometown newspapers almost never wrote a thing about black life in the South or in their own backyards.
His opening paragraph set the tone:
For four endless, crawling weeks I was a Negro in the Deep South. I ate, slept, traveled, lived Black. I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations. I traveled Jim Crow in buses and trains and streetcars and taxicabs. Along with 10,000,000 Negroes I endured the discrimination and oppression and cruelty of the iniquitous Jim Crow system.
Sprigle was a seasoned, colorful, award-winning journalist. A celebrity in Pittsburgh, he was renowned for undercover exploits that included booking himself into a state mental hospital, working for a week as a scab in a striking coal mine and posing as a black market meat salesman during World War II.
In his Southern series Sprigle railed like a mad muckraker about the iniquities that still haunt us today in the North and South, albeit in far less severe ways. His subjects included lynchings, the violent suppression of black voting rights, the blatant under-funding of black education and “the wanton murders” and unjustified police shootings of unarmed black men.
As a self-made authority on proper modern policing, Sprigle pointed out that the crime rate in Atlanta’s largest black neighborhood was high, violent and largely a result of the city’s negligent policing policy that put law-abiding residents at the mercy of criminals.
He mocked Atlanta’s all-white criminal “justice” system for not prosecuting the cold-blooded murder of unarmed black men by armed trolley conductors. He also wasn’t afraid to discuss touchy issues like skin color and inter-racial sex.
And though Sprigle didn’t think it would matter much in the long run, he cheered Dobbs’ tireless efforts to get Atlanta’s lily-white government to hire its first black cops to patrol the comparatively well-to-do neighborhood where Dobbs and his precocious young preacher friend Martin Luther King Jr. lived.
Though Sprigle’s entire series was enthusiastically and exclusively carried to black readers in every part of country by the mighty Pittsburgh Courier, it didn’t run in a single white newspaper in the South.
The South’s white journalists were outraged by the secret trespassing of a troublemaking “liberal” Yankee newspaperman like Sprigle. His bitter and sarcastic portrayal of their racist culture and his put-downs of “the master race” were especially insulting to the most reliable defender of segregation and Southern culture, “liberal” journalist Hodding Carter of Mississippi. Carter wrote a six-part series in response to Sprigle called “The Other Side of Jim Crow.”
Meanwhile, Sprigle’s shocking “expose” of Jim Crow America was a huge hit north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It pleased millions of blacks and their top civil rights leaders. It was lauded and well-covered by Time and other East Coast magazines. It won high praise from Eleanor Roosevelt in her national column.
Sprigle’s series also sparked the first important debate in the major national media (print and radio) about the future of American apartheid.
In November of 1948, a week after Truman defeated Dewey, he and Hodding Carter debated the future of Jim Crow segregation in front of 1,500 people at Town Hall in New York City and on a live prime-time radio public affairs program carried by more than 200 stations.
Though largely forgotten today, Sprigle’s moral and constitutional indictment of Jim Crow was groundbreaking. It was the first time a major white paper in the North took an in-depth look at the shameful elephant that had been sitting in the national newsroom for half a century.
Unfortunately, Sprigle turned out to be his profession’s lone civil rights pioneer. The front-page mugging he and the owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette gave Jim Crow was not followed up by other northern reporters or influential papers like the New York Times.
In 1948, six years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the “separate but equal” doctrine was unconstitutional, it was still too soon for the northern white press to wake up and practice civil rights activism.
There’s no evidence Sprigle’s series changed history or directly influenced the people who were shaping it. By exposing the hard heart and soul of Jim Crow to the entire country, he provided a valuable, if immeasurable, contribution to the embryonic civil rights movement.
But it took the power of television to arouse the North’s social conscience for good. Black-and-white images of mobs taunting schoolchildren and local governments using clubs, police dogs and fire hoses on peaceful American citizens proved far more persuasive than Sprigle’s fiery words.
When Sprigle boarded that segregated train to Atlanta with John Wesley Dobbs 75 years ago this month, he wasn’t going on a crusade to slay Jim Crow or change the world for the better.
As he confessed later, he went South simply because he saw “the possibility of a darned good newspaper story.” He was right about that, of course. But he never expected that what he’d see in the Land of Jim Crow would make him ashamed to be an American.
Sprigle, who thanked Dobbs for making his mission a success but never revealed his name, never claimed to be an early civil rights crusader. He was a friend of the underdog, but not a liberal do-gooder.
As he said at the close of his radio debate with the segregation-forever journalist Hodding Carter, “… it seems to me to require some effrontery to discuss when and how you are going to apply the Constitution of the United States to a segment of the population. I think that many of your problems of segregation would be solved by the simple recognition of the Negro in the South as a citizen of the United States, subject to the rights granted him and every other citizen by the Constitution.”
On May 7, Boris Karpa interviewed me about Sprigle and my book for a NewBooksNetwork podcast.
Books
Ex-newspaperman Bill Steigerwald is the author of 30 Days a Black Man, which retells the true story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. Sprigle's original series is in Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow. Steigerwald also wrote Dogging Steinbeck, which exposed the truth about the fictions and fibs in Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people. And in 2022 he published Grandpa Bear Goes to Washington, a satirical kids book for all ages that all polar bears and lovers of freedom will like.